Reflections in a Rearview Mirror
Teya Schaffer
2025, 54 pages
$10.95

Reviewed by Judith Katz

Teya Schaffer’s short volume of prose and poetry begins with a piece called “Appreciations.” It’s a conversation between an unnamed narrator and a street woman she calls Valerie—aka the “dog lady”—that takes place as the two sit on a curb in San Francisco circa 1970 or 1980. As the two talk companionably about the Free Clinic, women’s land, and animal rights, they are interrupted not once but twice by a man who aggressively approaches and insults them, excoriating the narrator for her masculine appearance. Her friend Valerie ignores the man. Our narrator takes Valerie’s lead, and the man eventually goes away.

I read “Appreciations” decades ago in a journal called Common Lives/Lesbian Lives in issue number seven, Spring 1983 (65-68). It struck me then, as it strikes me now, as a vivid picture of that San Francisco street life. But it also strikes me as a vivid reminder that attacks—verbal and physical—on our queer bodies are not anything new.

Other stories in this slim collection explore difficult and important relationships. “A Letter to San Francisco” is a painful correspondence between a woman who finds her lesbian footing in San Francisco and her closeted, married lover, originally published in Sinister Wisdom: 31 Winter 1987 (67-71). “With Love, Lena” is an aging Holocaust survivor’s reminiscence of her secret lover in New York City on the occasion of her death. It is a powerful story about survival in all of its forms, and though it was first published in Sinister Wisdom: 29/30 The Tribe of Dina, A Jewish Women’s Anthology (157-158) last century, it still is as powerful today.

The poems and stories in Reflections in a Rearview Mirror talk about illness, motherhood, and widowhood—all within the framework of what it means to be an out lesbian—in the late 1900s and now, in the early 2000s. They are frank, powerful, and moving reminders—a kind of historical document but also a road map of what it still means to be a lesbian, a mother, an ex-lover, a widow, and a wife, even now, in this perilous and treacherous time.

Judith Katz is the author of two novels, The Escape Artist and Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound, which won the 1992 Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction. She is currently working on sequels to both novels and is still meditating on her novel in a drawer, The Atomic Age.