Contributors
Margie Adam is a singer-songwriter-pianist and one of the founder-organizers of Women's Music, a Second Wave feminist cultural initiative fueled by lesbian passion. Her song, "We Shall Go Forth!" resides in the Smithsonian's Political History Division. She is associate producer of two films, Radical Harmonies: A History of Women's Music and No Secret Anymore! The Times of Del Martin & Phyllis Lyon. Work with the labyrinth inspired two recent projects, Avalon, a vocal recording and PORTAL, a multi-media work featuring her contemplatiove solo piano music and photography of Scotland's ancient Callanish Stones. Currently, Margie is completing a PhD program related to future work as an Integrative Counselor committed to creating a safe, empowering, and joyful environment for women in transition.
Elana Dykewomon has been a cultural worker and social justice activist since the 1970s. She is the 2009 recipient of the Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists' Prize. Her seventh book, Risk (a novel) is new (!) from Bywater Books. Her Jewish lesbian historical novel, Beyond the Pale, won the Lambda Literary and Ferro-Grumley lesbian novel awards. Dykewomon was editor of the lesbian feminist journal, Sinister Wisdom, for nine years; co-coordinated disabled and senior access for the San Francisco Dyke March until 2010; teaches literature at SFSU and offers private creative writing classes— see www.dykewomon.org. She lives in Oakland, California with her partner, Susan, surrounded by friends.
Elliott Femynye batTzedek is a dyke writer who, after 18 years, has come to grips with the fact that she's now from Philadelphia. Her narrative "Wanting a Gun" appeared in Trivia 6 (2007). Her poems, essays, reviews, and cartoons have been published in Sinister Wisdom, Rain and Thunder, Poetica, the online journal Awakened Woman, off our backs, Sojourner, The Lesbian Review of Books and other local and national Feminist journals and newspapers. Her essays have been reprinted in anthologies such as Gender Through the Prism of Difference (Oxford University Press), Lesbian Culture: An Anthology (Crossing Press) and Out of the Class Closet: Lesbians Write About Class (Crossing Press). And even, years ago, in Common Lives, Lesbian Lives and Lesbian Ethics. She is currently working on a MFA in poetry at Drew University. She has worked as an editor and free-lance writer, and currently teaches graduate courses in Children's Literature and Publishing and, after being laid off from a ten-year job, is digging through old boxes of Lesbian Connections issues in search of the circa 1987 crystal collection which came with the promise that the universe was a Great Mother who would take care of us and move all things toward the highest good.
L. Chris Fox is a queerly lesbian-feminist doctoral candidate in English at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. Her primary research interests are in Canadian and Queer Women's literatures and her dissertation examines a mid-1990s Vancouver queer women's publication node and its context. She has published in Ariel, Atlantis, Studies in Canadian Literature, and Migrance compare / Comparing Migration (2008). Some of her previous exploits were recently reported in Ariel Levy's "Lesbian Nation" (The New Yorker Mar. 2, 2009), which is also pretty amusing.
Natalie G. is 17 years old. She lives in Lawrence, KS and spends her days playing with her cats, rolling around the dogs, and, like any other teenager, surfing the web. She is president of her school's Gay-Straight Alliance, because of that she is constantly involved in the LGBT world. Besides that, she enjoys music, being with friends, and living like any other 17-year-old.
Carolyn Gage is a lesbian feminist playwright, performer, author, and activist. The author of nine books and more than fifty-five plays, she is the 2009 winner of the Lambda Literary Award in drama. Her website is www.carolyngage.com
Dolores Klaich is the author of Woman Plus Woman: Attitudes Toward Lesbianism, Heavy Gilt (a spoof of a mystery whose theme is internalized heterosexism), short fiction, essays, articles, and a magical piece in Trivia #5 called "Waiting for Sappho." She lives in southern Vermont.
Arleen Paré lives and writes in Victoria, BC. She is a retired social worker. Her first book, Paper Trail (NeWest, 2007), was nominated for the 2008 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award and won the 2008 Victoria Butler Book Prize. Her writing has appeared in various journals including The Malahat Review, CVII, and Geist magazine.
Cynthia Rich is co-author with Barbara Macdonald of Look Me in the Eye: Old Women, Aging and Ageism and author of Desert Years: Undreaming the American Dream. She is co-founder of The Old Women's Project (www.oldwomensproject.org) and most recently is the author of dharma gleanings: company for a meditation practice (www.dharmagleanings.org).
Ruthann Robson's work appeared in TRIVIA issues 14, 15 & 20. More about her is available at www.ruthannrobson.com.
Seema Shah is a Vancouver physician who left practice in 2004 due to chronic illness. Since then she has facilitated workshops using literature and creative writing for people living with illness and for health professional students. Her creative writing has been published or is forthcoming in Portfolio milieu 2004 (an anthology of Canadian women's writing), Women Who Care: Canadian Women's Experiences of Health Care and Caring, Blood and Thunder: Musings on the Art of Medicine, and others. In 2008, her writing was shortlisted for the Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archives' First Person Narrative Essay Contest.
Esther Shannon grew up as a tomboy and then became a feminist, a mother and a lesbian somewhere between Cape Breton and British Columbia circa 1951 – 1977. In 1975, she founded the Powell River Women's Centre, one of the first rural women's centres established in British Columbia. Since then, she has worked on a wide range of feminist issues in government and the community in Ottawa and, for the last 30 years, in Vancouver. She is a former editor of Kinesis, a Vancouver-based feminist newspaper that played a central role in the B.C. women's movement for over 25 years. In 2007, she founded FIRST, a national coalition of feminists advocating for sex worker labour and human rights and for the decriminalization of sex work in Canada. Today, she works as a partner with Frontline Consulting, a consulting group with specific expertise around sex industry related issues, organizational and policy development and research, communications and public education. She passionately believes that neutrality is not a virtue, as Camus once argued, and celebrates all those who work for progressive change.
Susanna J. Sturgis is the author of The Mud of the Place (Speed-of-C Productions, December 2008), a novel about small-town people getting unstuck with a little help from their friends. In 1999, when she got back into horses after 30 years away, she finally understood her life as a ongoing search for places where it was OK to dress in barn clothes and hang out with girls. Such places tend to be fermentatious, but she didn't realize that till she wrote this essay. She thanks the Feminist Women's Writing Workshops (defunct), Wintertide Coffeehouse (also defunct), and WisCon, the feminist science fiction convention (still thriving!), for giving her plenty of reasons to believe. For comments and encouragement on this particular essay, she is deeply grateful to Susan Robinson and Bonna Whitten-Stovall. Susanna is a year-round resident of the seasonally occupied territory of Martha's Vineyard, where she lives with a young Alaskan malamute, makes her living as a freelance editor, and dresses in barn clothes even when she's not at the barn. You can find her online at www.susannajsturgis.com or www.themudoftheplace.com.
Jean Taylor lives and writes, does tai chi and meditates on Wurundjeri country in Melbourne, Australia. Her latest book, Brazen Hussies: A Herstory of Radical Activism in the Women's Liberation Movement in Victoria 1970 - 1979, was published by Dyke Books Inc. in October 2009.
Lise Weil teaches in Goddard College's Individualized MA program and lives in Montreal, Quebec, where she is currently grieving the loss early this year of two of our finest local singer/songwriters: Llasa de Sela and Kate McGarrigle. Beyond Recall, a collection of the last writings of local painter and writer Mary Meigs, which she compiled and edited, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in biography in 2006.
Emily Williams is due to submit her PhD in October 2009: "Can queer theory be used to further the understanding of (trans)genders and sexualities for English secondary school students." (S)he is the author of an online student toolkit aimed at LGBTQ young people and their heterosexual friends (www.schools-out.org.uk/STK). (S)he has had an article published in Gender and Education (16(3) 2008) and is on the editorial board for The Journal of Gender Studies. Emily has given papers at the Place-Based Sex/Sexualities and Relationship Education conference (University of London, 2007), Becoming or Unbecoming: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Research in the 21st Century (Northumbria University, 2008) and is due to present a paper at the Brighton and Sussex Sexualities Conference in September 2009. Emily is on the committee for Schools OUT and LGBT History Month and teaches at the University of the West of England and the University of Gloucestershire. As an undergraduate (s)he studied Drawing and Applied Art and drew her dissertation entitled "Queer Theory and Lesbian Appropriation of Homomasculine Signifiers." (S)he is desperate to leave Bristol and wants to move into an intentional community near Cheltenham to live the good life.
Deborah Yaffe did the classic Women's Liberation Movement arc from unexamined hetero to thoughtful bi to, upon falling madly in love 27 years ago with my current partner, considering myself a lesbian because I live a "lesbian life," which used to be a meaningful concept. I left the US in 1967. I've been involved in radical feminist politics since 1971 or thereabouts, originally in England, and in Victoria since I moved here in 1981. I was involved with the Everywomans Books collective from 1982 until its closure in 1997. I was the staffperson for the Victoria Status of Women Action Group 1986-1989. I taught Women's Studies1990-2004 at UVic, where I co-taught the first Lesbian Studies course with my now-deceased colleague and friend, Michele Pujol.
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