Sarah Horner Interviews Dianna Hunter
Dianna Hunter’s Work and Its Ties to Midwestern Lesbian Culture

Sarah Horner: The Midwest is seldom perceived as a place where LGBTQ+ culture is preserved and cultivated, but your work and life prove otherwise. What is it about the Midwest that encouraged you to live, write, and teach here?

Dianna Hunter: The Midwest is a diverse place, with braided histories that include labor and civil rights organizing, farmers’ co-operatives, Indigenous sovereignty, feminist organizations, LGBTQ activism, and more. I grew up in a working-class home in Minot, North Dakota. Mom and Dad were union members, liberals, and DIYers in the 1950s and 1960s. They worked for wages, and they allowed me to be what people now call a “free-range” kid.

Most of my friends free-ranged. We wore jeans, got our hands dirty, and roamed the town on our bikes. Some of us played softball. That’s one place you could find lesbians, even in Minot. We had an Air Force base and missile silos that made us a nuclear target, but Mom chose to warn me about “queers” on a women’s softball team that I admired. She meant to shelter me, but she unknowingly alerted me that some women loved other women—not that I knew what to do with the information back then. Heterosexist programming had most of us mystified.

I didn’t wake to my sapphic identity until college. The expense of sending me to a liberal arts school in Saint Paul stretched my parents’ budget, but they let me go. I found feminism and lesbian identity there. One of my history teachers gave me a copy of the “Redstockings Manifesto,” where I first encountered the concepts of female oppression and male privilege. This set off a progression of discovery. I found the original Amazon Bookstore Co-op in Minneapolis and, along with it, women’s liberation and lesbian writing. I taught a course on feminism as a student and came out in 1971. A friend started the Lesbian Resource Center in Minneapolis the next year, and after trying to farm on women’s land for eleven years, I moved on to graduate school, college teaching, and writing.

Sarah: You have a new novel, Clouded Waters, that follows a journalist searching for a missing environmental scientist while mourning the loss of her wife. How did this project begin?

Dianna: Before the virus arrived, I’d been working on a mystery novel. I had a rough draft, but I wasn’t satisfied with it. When Covid came along, the shutdown gave me time to catch up on my reading. I wanted to know more about an environmental controversy that was (and still is) going on here in northeastern Minnesota. Three companies—all tied to international mining conglomerates—want to mine for copper and nickel. So far, none of them has managed to get through all of the legal and regulatory obstacles, and locals are split between the promise of prosperity and concern for the environment. The ore deposits run through sulfide rock that can leach sulphuric acid and heavy metals into the environment when exposed to water. We’re a wet state, and our watersheds drain to Hudson Bay, the Mississippi River, and the Atlantic by way of Lake Superior. In other words, they drain to the world, so there’s a lot to be concerned about.

I started asking myself, “Why not connect the story to these issues? Why not make the main character the publisher of a small, multi-generational newspaper? Why not make her a mature person, balancing grief for her wife and loneliness for their grown kids against her need to keep that struggling newspaper alive in the age of disinformation and political corruption? Why not have her personal struggle happen at a time when her community is also struggling over this potential new mine? Why not connect the crime to the controversy? Oh, and why not add a little romance to the mystery and have a new woman come to town?” The answers led to the story I tell in Clouded Waters.

Sarah: Clouded Waters features Indigenous and Métis (mixed racial ancestry) characters. Why was it important to you to include them in your book?

Dianna: Clouded Waters makes clear that the place we now call the Mesabi Range of Minnesota was home to the Dakota and Anishinaabe (also known as Ojibwe or Chippewa) before SB’s [SB is Susan B. Ellingson, the protagonist of Clouded Waters] people arrived, but it goes deeper than a land acknowledgement. The characters cross binaries, borders, and bloodlines, and we learn through their stories that people have been doing this for a long, long time.

The Indigenous people have not vanished from this place, and they are still enacting their own personal and cultural histories. SB keeps all of this in mind as she tries to work out her responsibility to her community, the earth, and her deceased Indigiqueer wife’s (Ramona’s) people, including the children she and Ramona raised together. In real life, by federal treaty, the Anishinaabe are guaranteed rights to hunt, fish, and gather across their homelands in northern Minnesota. When environmental degradation threatens to harm water, plants, and wildlife, they have unique legal standing to fight in court for the earth and water, and they have played a major role in holding off multinational mining corporations and oil pipelines.

In Anishinaabe culture, women are traditionally the water protectors. Their work has been spiritual, cultural, political, and effective, and Indigenous people are doing this dangerous work around the world. That’s why, in Clouded Waters, I have Ramona’s mother, Alberta Desjardin, leading a group of water-protecting grandmothers who protest against the environmental dangers posed by the mine. Without her, the story would be incomplete.

Sarah: How have your own experiences with back-to-the-land life influenced your fiction writing, particularly Clouded Waters?

Dianna: As a writer, I’ve been able to draw on my experiences, failures, and successes, and there have been plenty of all three. In my twenties, I lived with other lesbians on farms in Wisconsin and Minnesota. To make ends meet, I got a job working with dairy farmers and often stayed overnight with farm families so that I could collect milk samples at evening and morning milkings. Later, I bought my own dairy farm and worked as a farmer’s advocate, trying to help my neighbors keep their land during the Reagan-era farm crisis. I’ve met a wide variety of people, taken it all in, and used it in my fiction—filtered, transformed, and tied to made-up events through invention and imagination.

In Clouded Waters, I created a mid-sized town like, and yet also unlike, towns that exist on the Mesabi Iron Range. I filled it with the kind of villains, heroes, ne’er-do-wells, and everyday, well-meaning people you could meet in a mining town. The main character, SB Ellingson, runs a multi-generational newspaper that’s on the verge of going broke, as so many actual small-town newspapers have already done. She refuses to accept failure and decides to seek the truth about the proposed new mine and a missing water scientist. As she investigates, she mourns her dead wife, Ramona, a Two-spirit Anishinaabe/Ojibwe person. SB returns to the natural places they experienced together and is reminded of the ongoing relevance of their conversations about identity, land ownership, white accountability, and corporate environmental destruction.

Sarah: How do you perceive the connection between lesbians and the land/environment?

Dianna: In my memoir Wild Mares, I tell my own nonfiction story of living several years with lesbians in experimental land projects in the 1970s. We saw the land as a place to connect with nature, grow wholesome food, remake ourselves, and live sustainably. We wanted to get free of misogyny and gender oppression. That meant living just with women, becoming self-sufficient, and exploring our love and passions for one another. Most of us had few financial resources, so we tried to invent ways of living together that bridged private ownership and collective responsibilities.

It wasn’t easy, and the sustainability of lesbian land and lesbian community continues to be a point of discussion, struggle, and mentoring. I’m skeptical of some kinds of lesbian woo-woo, but I’ve been taking myself to nature and grounding myself in wild spaces since I was a child. That’s where I’ve found the sacred and recognized my roots. It’s complicated because my ancestors farmed, gardened, foraged, and hunted on this continent as immigrants, colonizers, and settlers.

It has to be said that we appropriated the lands we love from Indigenous people—Lakota, Dakota, and Anishinaabe, in my case. We have to find a way to account for land theft and help the Indigenous Land Back movement. And yet, the natural world still speaks to us and through us. As a young lesbian, I took myself to the land to heal and grow, and at seventy-four, I still look to nature for these gifts. My duty as a writer is to give back, to contribute to the restoration of the earth and to help foster a just and loving human community.

Sarah: As a college student and intern for Sinister Wisdom, I’ve learned a lot about lesbian history and how writing has allowed generations of lesbians to express and feel confident in their identity. From your perspective, what does writing/literature do for the LGBTQ+ community?

Dianna: Writing is a tool for reshaping the world. Besides giving enjoyment, one of the main uses of literature is teaching empathy. A writer creates a world for the reader to step into and experience through the eyes of others—that is, the characters the writer has created. It’s hard to enter another’s world so deeply without gaining insight and a sense of commonality. In our case, as lesbians and other queer-identified people (and even as women, for those of us who identify that way), we’ve found our true selves in literature by writing ourselves into it. Like BIPOC people, we were misrepresented in the old white male canon, and without accurate representation, no one is truly seen. Representation is a necessary condition for shaping a more empathetic world. So is the unmediated voice. We need to speak for ourselves and represent ourselves, not just for the sake of accuracy (though that’s part of it), but to make ourselves be seen as plausible, strong, primary characters, not just sidekicks, buddies, neighbors, and villains. We need to tell our own stories.

Sarah: Who are some of your own personal lesbian literary heroes/inspirations?

Dianna: There are so many to choose from! Where do I start and end? Patricia Highsmith, Jane Rule, Rita Mae Brown, Pat Parker, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Rosemary Keefe Curb and Nancy Manahan, Audre Lorde, Paula Gunn Allen, Starhawk, and Emma Donoghue—to name just a few in a long and cherry-picked list. Most recently, I appreciated Emma Donoghue’s novel Learned by Heart, a searingly emotional re-imagination of Eliza Raine’s first love with the diary-writing Anne Lister (subject of the TV series Gentleman Jack) at their girls’ boarding school in the early 19th century.

Sarah: How does your work fit into the larger conversation of lesbian representation and/or environmentalism?

Dianna: My work fits somewhere between ‘eco-feminist lesbian writing’ and the literature people are calling ‘Queer Ecology’ or ‘EcoQueer.’ My novel is a genre-crosser that normalizes the blurring of binaries and borders. It’s a whodunit, a romance, and a serious exploration of what a small collection of strong women, lesbians, genderqueer people, and allies do to uphold each other when their community breaks down in the face of economic desperation, industrial greed, racism, homophobia, and the threat of environmental ruin. My memoir tells the nonfiction story of actual young lesbians in the mid-1970s pioneering our own real-life versions of the kind of eco-feminist, speculative, back-to-nature community Sally Gearhart imagined in her 1978 novel, The Wanderground.

Sarah Horner is a writer, a recent graduate of the University of Minnesota, and an intern at Sinister Wisdom. Her poetry and fiction are published or forthcoming in places such as Across the Margin, The Minnesota Review, Defunkt Magazine, and The Bitchin’ Kitsch. She lives in Minneapolis with her cat Goose.

Dianna Hunter is a writer, lesbian, farmer, and educator based in Duluth, Minnesota. Hunter’s experience growing up in rural North Dakota informed her memoir, Wild Mares: My Lesbian Back-to-the-Land Life, a finalist for the 2018 Minnesota Book Award. She has taught writing and gender studies at four universities, including the University of Wisconsin-Superior. Hunter’s recent novel, Clouded Waters, is described as “an environmental thriller/whodunit/Sapphic romance.”

Age Brings Them Home to Me
windflower
Finishing Line Press, 2024, 45 pages
$19.99

Reviewed by Courtney Heidorn

In her collection Age Brings Them Home to Me, windflower uses the perspective from Mother Earth to see everything life offers: family, love, self-actualization, and justice.

In poems like “I am from the ocean” and “Seeds of Fear,” windflower tells the story of her family’s genealogy as if they were ocean tides. She writes, “I am from the ocean / of my mother’s womb / that liminal space:” (4). The colon at the end of the poem is intentional: it acts as a gateway to the ocean that is her family—the ever-flowing tides and sporadic waves.

“Seeds of Fear” is a prose poem grappling with the mixed feelings family can stir up, especially for queer people. Battling religious trauma, the speaker realizes that their family can be a source of comfort: “The trinity of us huddle on the dusty pink couch in absolution of love” (15). These familial poems ebb and flow like the ocean in content and theme.

In the same vein, love is explored in a romantic sense with the speaker’s voice informed by the natural world. “Canoe me into deep waters” excels in natural imagery: “rain me to the ground, / light breeze me along / the lips of river’s currents, / thunderstorm me lightening / my bones to stars, / serenade me with sweet corn / salty butter dripping / from my mouth” (17). The speaker considers their lover just as essential and beautiful as nature. My personal favorite romantic line imbued with natural imagery is: “kisses that melted glaciers / kisses that know neither season nor coast.” (20). Equating a lover with Mother Earth conveys a deep devotion and is wonderful for a reader to witness.

In addition to genealogy and romantic love, windflower uses her devotion to nature for self-growth. In an anti-capitalist stride, she writes, “But what about those days I just want / to be a leaf on a bough. Waiting / to turn red” (23). It makes sense for windflower to express this sentiment, as nature is in no hurry. Imagining the speaker as a leaf waiting for the gentle renewal of seasons is peaceful and healing.

One poem stands out in Age Brings Them Home to Me. In “My First History Lesson,” windflower recounts the story her tenth-grade biology teacher told her about her son being murdered in Mississippi for registering Black voters. windflower beautifully and concisely tells his story. Even though the subject matter is challenging, this poem aligns with the rest of the collection, since windflower includes her signature nature imagery: “their bloody hands / hollowed stars from the sky / and the moon went mad” (35).

Overall, windflower’s poems are powerful because they are rooted in nature: the most powerful source of creative inspiration. Readers will hear echoes of Mary Oliver in windflower’s poetic voice housed in a chapel in the trees.

Courtney Heidorn (she/they) is a Sinister Wisdom intern. She holds a BA in English and creative writing from Azusa Pacific University. You can see more of their work in CURIOUS Magazine and at Pearl Press.

Grace Period
Elisabeth Nonas
Rattling Good Yarns Press, 2024, 286 pages
$18.95

Reviewed by Judith Katz

Elisabeth Nonas’ lovely fourth novel, Grace Period, starts with a funeral—and a standup comedy act. The funeral is for Grace Black, an art history professor at a small college in Ithaca, New York. The comedienne filling us in on the details of the funeral is Grace’s partner of 25 years, 70-year-old Hannah Greene, who is on the edge of retiring from her position in the English department of that same college.

Grace was ten years Hannah’s junior. She died of a stroke on the way to Hannah’s retirement party, just weeks away from the start of her sabbatical. Going back and forth in time, Hannah traces the stories of her past and present life with Grace and the dashed hopes of what was to be their future. She spends the bulk of her grieving (and this novel) trying to figure out who she is and what she is meant to do now that Grace is gone.

Nonas has created an affable first-person narrator with Hannah. She’s a funny and self-deprecating Jewish butch whose sartorial choices run to polos, tees, shorts, and sweats.

Grace was the cook in the family and the gardener, too. When left to her own devices, Hannah feels lost in the beautifully appointed kitchen the couple designed together to meet Grace’s exacting specifications. Days into her grieving, Hannah is barely able to make herself a cup of espresso as she finds herself at odds with a newfangled coffee maker clearly purchased by Grace before her accident. Hannah can’t even figure out what to eat for dinner or, once having done that, how to prepare it.

Friends reach out, offer dinner and coffee dates, and even suggest she get a dog. But Hannah seems committed to her isolation. To establish some order in her life, Hannah begins to consult the imaginary Grace for advice about what to do next. She makes lists and slowly begins to follow them, heating up soup and eventually getting herself to eat it.

Hannah’s isolation doesn’t last for long. A few days after the funeral, a dusty Subaru, like the one Grace used to drive, roars up to the house. Out pop Cristina, the new instructor to the Art History department that Grace had hired, and Nicole, her lover. Unaware of Grace’s death, the two are caught off guard, but Hannah graciously offers them a temporary place to stay with the caveat that she won’t be very good company. The women reluctantly take Hannah up on her offer, and she seems to reluctantly welcome them in.

All the while, Hannah struggles to find solid memories of her life with Grace. Yes, there are souvenirs of their various trips together, like a particular bottle of wine that lets her reminisce. But none of these things seem sufficient. It isn’t until she finds herself cleaning out Grace’s office at the college where they both worked that Hannah finally stumbles onto evidence of something concrete that raises a memory. It’s precisely the kind of recollection a surviving partner would much rather forget, and yet, this hint of an event (which may or may not have happened) is exactly the thing that eventually brings Hannah toward a real sense of grieving and the core of her love for Grace.

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.

The Jolt: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich
Julie Weiss
Bottlecap Press, 2023, 32 pages
$10.00

Reviewed by Pelaya Arapakis

The Jolt: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich by Julie Weiss is a dazzling poetic collection that revels in the majesty and resilience of lesbian love. The chapbook gorgeously echoes Adrienne Rich’s 1976 work, Twenty-One Love Poems, both in essence and in form, indulging us with tender vignettes of a budding relationship set in Spain. Brimming with lush, image-laden descriptions of love, the collection can be read as a tribute not only to Rich but to lesbian erotic histories.

Weiss imbues a potent sensuality throughout her collection, punctuating scenes of the daily mundane with a lust of cosmic proportions. In poem VI, the narrator is overwhelmed by the surging currents of desire: “Every / object I hand to you takes the shape / of rapture. We are two women / on a park bench, daydreaming, the space / between our hips unbearable” (6). The narrator aches for the touch of her lover, and this need for her lover’s embrace has become a basic necessity of life, much like food. This is strikingly distilled in poem II, where the narrator muses, “How, even before I learn the word for / starvation, mine navigates the expectation of your breasts, your belly, the placid trail / downwards” (2). The ebb and flow of all-encompassing desire is also mirrored in The Jolt’s poetic structure. Weiss’ poems are arranged in five sets of couplets, and the poet plays with the constraints of this framework with dexterity. The emotional intensity of her poems often pushes up against the borders of this structure, threatening to burst right off the page.

In the same breath, Weiss refuses sanitised depictions of lesbian love and does not shy away from portraying the tensions that come with being visibly queer. Public displays of affection are often disrupted by intruding scenes of casual homophobia and sexual harassment. In poem VIII, the narrator soberly recounts, “In London, a couple like us was harassed / on a bus. Assaulted. Kiss! they roared” (8). In poem XIV, a public kiss shared by the lovers provokes a “leer of ruffians” (15). However, the transcendent nature of the couple’s love resists heterosexist hostility with both radiance and vigour. The narrator declares in poem IX, “I’d write an ocean full of poems, pull / the haters under the surging tide of our love” (9). Weiss does just that. Her collection stands as a testament to the sheer strength and beauty of a love that knows no bounds. The Jolt is a feast for the heart.

Pelaya Arapakis (she/her) is a Sinister Wisdom intern based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. She holds a BA in History from The University of Melbourne and is currently completing her Master’s in Arts and Cultural Management. She is also a musician and cultural worker. She is passionate about lesbian archiving, culture, and history.

unalone
Jessica Jacobs
Four Way Books, 2024, 210 pages
$17.95

Reviewed by Sisel Gelman

unalone by Jessica Jacobs is a poetry collection about longing—a deep, profound longing for the meaning, guidance, and connection found in the intersection between the physical and the spiritual worlds. Jacobs takes the twelve parshiyot (portions) of Genesis and revives the Old Testament with a refreshing series of personal stories and reflections that highlight the timelessness of our shared humanity across time and space with an emphasis on the contemporary now.

Throughout the text, Jacobs presents the urgency of the physical world with grace and vulnerability. Jacobs relates the lessons of the Bible to her upbringing, to her mother, to the love she has for her wife, and to the mundanity of life. The effect is magnetic, as the personal references trail into the sphere of myth themselves. Her personal stories become just as important and relatable as the stories of the Bible, maybe even more so. We see our own lives reflected in them. Jacobs also does not shy away from the topic of misogyny and racism in our day and age. The poignant references to injustice, mass shootings, and acts of overt antisemitism call upon the reader to reflect on the brokenness of the world and how it can begin to be healed. This is, once again, a world we recognize with our own eyes.

Jacobs embraces the magnitude of Genesis in her storytelling. She acknowledges how these stories feel larger than life and incorporates this grand tone and perspective into her literary style. Jacobs drops the audience right into the middle of biblical scenes so that they can experience the huge moments firsthand with all of their joys, stressors, and questions. The experience is made new again through a distinctive empathic lens. Jacobs asks herself how the underrepresented and silenced women of the Old Testament felt. She asks, “What was their perspective like?” It’s beautiful and touching to see these women gain a voice as Jacobs experiments with her own through unusual line placement and enjambment.

When I asked Jacobs why it’s important to talk about the intersection of queerness and feminism in terms of religion, she responded with the following: “Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers, advises us to place a fence around the Torah. This is a means of guarding it, of making its teachings and traditions sacred (a word that literally means to set apart). But as I explore in unalone’s first poem, “Stepping through the gate,” such fences can often be barriers, keeping people out—a fact especially true for women and perhaps even more so for queer folks. So many of us were raised to believe that there wasn’t a real place for us in religion, except perhaps as mothers and helpmeets to men. Scholars and poets like Alicia Ostriker and Eleanor Wilner showed us how we can take these stories back, look into the holes in the text, to all the women's stories written there in invisible ink, and bring them out into the light. And as a queer woman, it feels important that I permitted myself to also see my own experiences reflected in these stories, as I hope it might also help others find their way back into traditions that are theirs if they want them.”

One of my favorite poems in the collection is titled “Creation Stories,” and it evokes the desire Adam and Eve had for each other. In the poem, there is a longing to be complete—to be larger than the sum of individual parts. Through the metaphor of human companionship, we peek at the urge to be reunited with a divine fullness that is telling of Jacobs’s intuitive inclination towards the holy. This poetry collection insists there is something powerful and elevated in the spiritual realm, and through study and reflection, we might attain a fraction of it. This fraction will guide and heal us. It will bring us closer to the meaning we seek in such a chaotic world. Love will save us: the love we have for each other, for ourselves, our traditions, our history, and the sacred.

Sisel Gelman was raised in Mexico City and moved to Alaska to write her first novel. Her writing has been nominated for two EVVY Awards, she has won an ICPA award, and #siselgelman has over 3.2 million views on TikTok. Sisel is pursuing her MFA in Fiction at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her MA at the Bread Loaf School of English.

Love the World or Get Killed Trying
Alvina Chamberland
Noemi Press, 2024, 274 pages
$18.00

Reviewed by Sarah Parsons

Towards the middle of Alvina Chamberland’s autofiction novel Love the World or Get Killed Trying, the narrator takes the reader on a journey through a fever-induced fantasy of a life with footballer Ronaldo Nazário, in which she imagines herself “Queen Yoko Ono–Feminist Havoc-Wreaker Of The Football World!” By this point, the reader is well-acquainted with Chamberland’s uniquely humorous voice, which often takes the text into delightful surrealist territory. Love the World, Chamberland’s English-language debut, is a confessional story of one woman’s journey through Iceland, continental Europe, and California (sometimes in the moment, sometimes through memory). If Love the World is an adventure novel, then the reader serves as a sidekick of sorts. It often feels as though there is a dialogue taking place between reader and narrator, with Alvina tending the conversation, not unlike daily updates to a personal blog.

The novel buoys between hugely external moments in packed gay bars and Icelandic fjords, as well as more internal moments, reflecting on memory and life within the imagination. We are guided by Alvina’s inner monologue, which swings from dark humor to unexpected glee. Layered within the humor is a sense of solemnity; this is a book about survival, too, and the ongoing struggle to survive as a transgender woman. The reader experiences the world through Alvina’s eyes, as she encounters men who view her as an object of conditional desire all while she searches for a deeper, kinder love. Alvina meditates often on the subject of her own death: when it might come and how. She lives in a state of precarity, not by her own making, but by that of a patriarchal and transphobic culture. Alvina is a woman with a thirst for life–ever the intrepid traveler, she runs across the Icelandic countryside, bathes under waterfalls, and dreams up futures for herself with strangers. Yet, she has experienced great sorrow and pain. “Why,” she asks the reader, “does a male Buddhist monk write a book titled In Love With the World while a trans woman names her novel Love the World or Get Killed Trying?” This is the question at the heart of the novel.

Readers who enjoy journeys of self-discovery and adventure will find themselves drawn into the wonderful world of Alvina Chamberland. As the novel unfolds, its depth becomes apparent, and the reader will likely find themselves growing fond of the narrator and her idiosyncratic voice. This novel spans countries, oceans, and years of Alvina’s life. It is an ambitious piece of literature that I imagine will leave readers with the same burning sense of desire for existence that Alvina lives by. As Chamberland writes, “I have decided to cast my vote for a life governed by the principle that everything is meaningful.” This book affords a great deal of care to the full range of moments in a day and a life.

Sarah Parsons is a Sinister Wisdom intern and writer based in Oregon whose work can be found online in Paperbark Magazine.

My Withered Legs and Other Essays
Sandra Gail Lambert
University of Georgia Press, 2024, 152 pages
$23.95

Reviewed by Kali Herbst Minino and Gabe Tejada

My Withered Legs is Sandra Gail Lambert’s new memoir essay collection observing shifting relations between the different facets of her life–including writing, disability, aging, and autonomy.

Throughout, Lambert conceives of and interrogates power through a spectrum of in/dependence. Due to the societal and familial context of her upbringing—pre-Rehabilitation Act America in a military family—Lambert, particularly in her youth, equates power with a masculinist idea of strength.

Even in its mere recounting, the machismo attitude Lambert displays—one that values strength and abhors vulnerability—is off-putting, a testament to her evocative writing and presence on the page. Yet the moments when she feels most powerful because she exerts an inordinate amount of physical, mental, and emotional strength become especially poignant when contextualised within the dominant capitalist culture.

A careful reader will recognise that Lambert’s attitude in insisting to navigate, without help, a society that does not consider—and therefore was not built—for her needs is a symptom of living in a culture where (perceived) ability is currency. In a hyper-individualist America where humanity is reduced to a tokenistic autonomy, isolating independence is valued above community.

Lambert’s narrative triumphs in subtly challenging her own entrenched ideas of power. Illustrated by the shifting dynamics of her relationship with her mother and with her partner Pam, readers experience Lambert’s hard-won self-acceptance of being cared for. Her depiction of care work is nuanced, riddled with guilt and triumph, fear and freedom, and caring for is irrevocably intertwined with taking care of. Throughout this process we see how Lambert comes to understand that, just as “Disability was different from illness,” so too is vulnerability different from weakness.

Despite the specificity of Lambert’s perspective and experience, her writing is bound to resonate with readers of all kinds. Artfully covering topics of independence, the writing process, aging, and familial and romantic relationships, the collection of essays is about much more than the title suggests—her legs.

It is surprising that the collection is titled My Withered Legs. In the essay of the same name (though with the addition of “what is lost” in parenthesis), Lambert details a public obsession with her legs, with editors demanding to hear more details about them. Following this advice would erase the original point of her writing.

Choosing My Withered Legs as the collection’s title serves a dual purpose. It satiates the editor’s and the public’s obsession with her legs, which then drives the point of the titular essay home. I imagine an able-bodied reader—picking up the book because they are infatuated with the idea of reading about Lambert’s legs and struggles with disability—having a rude awakening when they realize they’ve played into the exact issue the author is critiquing.

The challenges Lambert faces in publishing her writing leave questions about what didn’t make it through the editorial filter, i.e. “My Withered Legs (what is lost),” and whether or not her wide appeal is something to be celebrated. In “Crip Humor,” Lambert explains that people using wheelchairs and their community would find the story funny. Explaining the joke makes the essay understandable to a large audience, but it became Lambert’s role to make that kind of understanding possible. If Lambert hadn’t had to cater to an able-bodied audience, how would the essay differ?

Readers can only speculate the answer to that question, and can only imagine exactly what was lost. In the meantime, Lambert’s collection is a perfect read for anyone pondering power—inside or outside the pages.

Kali Herbst Minino is a freelance journalist based in Seattle who works primarily for Seattle Gay News. They use a restaurant job to help fund their freelance journalism habit and love reading about labor movements, feminism, and media studies.

Gabe Tejada is a writer and reader based in Naarm/Melbourne whose work has been published in Archer Magazine and Kill Your Darlings, among others. Her greatest achievement thus far is her 800-day Duolingo streak.

City of Laughter
Temim Fruchter
Grove Atlantic, 2024, 384 pages
$27.00

Reviewed by Catherine Horowitz

What a strange coincidence it was that I, a queer Jew from Silver Spring, Maryland, who has lost my father, ended up unknowingly reviewing a book whose main character shares the same experiences. And yet, after reading Temim Fruchter’s City of Laughter, which encourages us to read things as fate, to insist on prescribing deeper meanings, I suppose I should consider that it wasn’t a coincidence at all.

In her moving, thought-provoking debut novel, Fruchter explores ideas of storytelling, intergenerational identity, and memory. City of Laughter primarily follows Shiva, a student who embarks on a quest to uncover the mysteries of her family that her mother, Hannah, seldom talks about. Newly recovering from both a breakup and her father’s death, Shiva’s research on her family and a web of Jewish folklorists takes her across the world and through time.

City of Laughter is told through many loose threads: four different generations of a family, all exploring their own questions of personal and familial identity. Hannah grapples with her strained relationship with her mother. Hannah’s mother has a collection of mysterious notes and is superstitious and distant. Her grandmother lives in a village in Poland, is deemed cursed, and attempts to understand the strange forces within herself. All are haunted by an immortal, ghostly being who seems to hold the answers they search for, but whom they can never truly wrap their minds around.

There is no real moment of tying all these threads together or of resolving all the narrative’s major questions; often it feels like when one is resolved, another is created. Instead of solutions, Fruchter leaves each character with more possibilities and unanswered questions. City of Laughter encourages lingering in these threads, in open questions, and embracing the fact that they may never be fully answered.

Much of City of Laughter is about Shiva’s research on S. An-sky, a twentieth-century folklorist best known for his play The Dybbuk. Shiva becomes fascinated by An-sky’s ethnographic survey about Jewish daily life in the Pale of Settlement. Although the survey has no answers, its questions speak for themselves, asking about specific rituals, customs, and folklore. It’s these unanswered questions that Shiva decides to focus on; instead of searching for neat conclusions in her research, she embraces the inevitable gaps and uncertainty in the pieces of history that we can access, which, in her words, “necessitate invention.”

In addition to following the story of Shiva’s family, City of Laughter is a collection of real and invented folktales, superstitions, and mythology, complementing the bits and pieces of history Shiva begins piecing together. Some stories have full arcs and tie thematically into the rest of the book. Some are incomplete stories with no resolution. Some even feel random, placed as interludes to the narrative without an obvious parallel. These stories intertwine with letters, memories, and past and present scenes from characters’ lives, all woven together into a sweeping tapestry.

City of Laughter is also a truthful, sincere exploration of identity. Shiva’s exploration of queerness goes hand in hand with her exploration of family history. To Shiva, both studies represent a potential for personal clarity and discovering underlying truths about herself. Fruchter discusses the process of forging a relationship to queerness, of feeling simultaneously out of place and at home in queer communities, of finding the words, the places, the ways of presenting yourself that make you feel most grounded, with an honesty and specificity unique to someone who personally understands this experience. Shiva treats queerness as an ongoing process, similar to her research on her family—something she will continue to investigate and grow into.

Shiva explores intergenerational queerness as well, wondering whether it is something she shares with her ancestors and the subjects of her research. She first looks for conclusive proof, jumping at small indications, but in the final stretches of the book interprets the loose ends in her family and An-sky as their own kind of queerness:

“Some part of her wanted to face S. An-sky himself more than anything, to take him by the shoulders, to ask, Well, were you? But queerness laughed in the face of proof. Queerness was not about a body of evidence but about layers of presence; a cumulative kind of hereness, insistent and glittering. A vertical line, even, lives and lives stacked on top of lives. Renegade desire that left no evidence behind; only a kind of residue that flickered in its wake.”

Ultimately, City of Laughter is not just a poignant exploration of personal identity and family; it is meticulous and thoroughly researched, sometimes feeling like an entire academic thesis told through fiction. It includes painstaking details about Shiva’s research and ultimately functions as a real collection of research on Jewish history and folklore, offering an entire framework on approaching historical queerness that intertwines with the lives and stories of Shiva’s family.

It is hard to truly pull off a sweeping epic like this one, but Fruchter’s debut novel is continuously riveting, insightful, and poignant, leaving readers all at once satisfied and curious about what the future holds.

Catherine Horowitz is a writer and teacher living in Washington, D.C. She earned a B.A. in English and Jewish Studies from Oberlin College. You can find her other work in Bright Wall/Dark Room, New Voices, and the Jewish Women’s Archive.

The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization that Transformed America
Katherine Turk
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2023, 448 pages
$32.00

Reviewed by Henri Bensussen

A passionate feminist, a supporter of the National Organization for Women (NOW), and a teacher of women’s history, Katherine Turk’s purpose in The Women of NOW is to clarify NOW’s founding and accomplishments. Accessible language and dramatic narrative were a plus for this reader. She’s done a lot of research, all of it cited in the last section of the book; readers may easily engage further if desired.

Scholars have taken two ways of writing about NOW, she states, either focusing on the motivations of its founding leadership or pieces of its overall history. Instead, Turk gives an overall picture of NOW’s structure by showing how the points of view of three of the early founders led to the organization’s weaknesses and strengths. Below are the early founders Turk discusses.

Aileen Hernandez (1926-2017), a feminist labor organizer, was aware of the effects of racism and sexism in our culture. She wanted NOW’s leadership to focus on problems specific to women of color and work with men to achieve feminist goals. Hernandez would become NOW’s second president. Her interests were always in the wider political concerns of the labor movement.

Patricia Hill Burnett (1920-2014), mother of four children, and married to a wealthy businessman who supported her feminism, hoped to diversify NOW’s politics and extend its appeal internationally. As a Republican, she supported her party’s support for the individual and wanted to broaden that to incorporate feminist principles.

Mary Jean Collins (1939- ), a generation younger than Hernandez and Burnett, brought a different outlook to NOW. Active in the Democratic party, she lived in Chicago and helped establish many chapters, especially in the Midwest. Collins served as a vice president of NOW in the early 1980s.

Betty Friedan, a labor journalist familiar with politics, became a celebrity upon publishing The Feminine Mystique in 1963. Pauli Murray, a Black organizer and attorney, represented Black women activists who felt Friedan’s influence and leadership could be used to support the civil rights of women of color. Together, they conceived of establishing a new organization to support their ideas. In June of 1966, Friedan and Murray decided to test their idea at the third annual gathering of State Commissions on the Status of Women in Washington, D.C., which many women activists would be attending.

Following the Commission’s last evening, Pauli and Friedan held a late-night party for some of the women attendees. Many more showed up after hearing about it. When their plan was explained to the group, an emotional discussion followed that lasted until two in the morning. Was one more women’s organization needed? It turned out that women did need it and wanted it. A sign-up sheet went around at the Commission’s last session later that morning. Dues were set at $5. Twenty-eight women signed up, becoming known as “the founders.” Not everyone had $5 for the dues, and financing NOW’s issues would become another problem as the organization grew.

NOW rapidly grew into hundreds of chapters and thousands of members. There was direction from the top, but chapters were also independent and could set their own agendas with little oversight from NOW’s board. Turk highlights this freedom and lack of organizational direction as a weakness. Another was a focus on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The elderly women who had marched for women’s right to vote supported the ERA and showed up at NOW’s first convention with demands for it, turning the members’ attention from civil rights to equal rights.

Murray’s hopes for more Black women members did not materialize, though they and/or their daughters went on to organize in different ways. The concept of intersectionality was not understood or acted on by NOW’s leadership of mostly white, middle-class women. For years there was barely a budget, no office staff, and little money. Read this fascinating book to learn about the controversies that NOW became known for, how they were settled, the history of the women who directed it, and how they did it. NOW is still a vibrant organization with 600 chapters and thousands of members. They are still fighting for the ERA and abortion rights, as they were back in the 1970s-80s.

Henri Bensussen (she/her) earned a B.A. in Biology at UC Santa Cruz. Her essays, poems, and short stories have been published in various journals and anthologies. Her mother tagged her as a bookworm and tomboy. She’s a lesbian feminist as defined in Lesbian Connection’s May/June 2024 issue.

Ella Stern Interviews Penny Mickelbury
Part One: Politics and the World Today

Ella Stern: Can you start by giving me a rundown of what your career has been like, both in journalism and out?

Penny Mickelbury: I wanted to be a reporter since I was very young and recognized the impact that newspapers had on my parents. I grew up in Atlanta in the bad old days. And the editor and publisher of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Eugene Patterson and Ralph McGill, started writing in the 1950s, saying to Southerners that, “We have to change, we have to stop. We cannot continue the way we’ve been going.”

And morning and evening, before anything, [my parents said], “Let’s see what McGill and Patterson have to say today.” I [thought], “Wow, I want to do that. I want to be able to have a positive impact on people’s lives.” As a child, I didn’t fully understand the danger that they were putting themselves in because they were saying to white Southerners in the ’50s, “You guys gotta cut this crap out. We’ve got to stop it. We can’t keep treating people like this. We can’t keep living like this.” And it was not well-received any more than it’s well-received today.

But I wanted to do that. I thought that that was just about the best thing that a person could do. In Atlanta, there was a Black daily, the Atlanta Daily World. And then there were two weeklies. That was at a time when most cities had two newspapers: a morning and an evening daily. And people subscribed to them. Now, we have no newspapers in the country. [In high school] I knew the editor of one of the weeklies, and I asked him if I could work there, and he said sure. So [in the] summers, I went to work there. I thought I was going to be writing, but no, I was learning layout. I taught journalism at a middle school in Los Angeles many years later, and I was able to teach layout to the students because it makes a difference where you place a story.

I was the first Black reporter at the Athens Banner-Herald [in] Athens, Georgia. [Earlier,] I had applied for a job there, and the publisher didn’t hesitate to tell me, “No, you can’t be a reporter here.” So, I got a job overnight copy editing and rewriting during my senior year. And then, the guy called me into his office one day. He said, “Okay, you can have a job as a reporter now.” And I said, “Really? Why?” Students were demonstrating. There was a lot of demonstrating going on, and I used to participate until I started working. He said, “They said they’re going to burn down my newspaper if I don’t have a Black reporter, and you’re the only one I know.” And that’s how I got a job as the first Black reporter at the Athens Banner-Herald.

And then, after almost a year of doing that, I got a call from the Washington Post. Eugene Patterson had been following my career. And he said, “You want a job at the Washington Post?” Well, hell yeah, I want a job at the Washington Post!

So that’s how I got to the Post. Just from knowing from my parents’ reactions to what these men were saying and the changes that were beginning to be fomented in the South then, [I knew] that I wanted to be able to have that kind of impact on everything, everybody—righting wrongs. Journalism to me was a place to right wrongs.

I look at journalism now, and I don’t recognize it as the same profession that I worked at. But we took that stuff seriously. The Fourth Estate is given protections under the Constitution. So I think we have an obligation to that. Now, you got members of Congress and on the Supreme Court who don’t know what the Constitution is. They don’t know what it says. And they certainly don’t take seriously the oath that they rose their hands and swore to uphold, to protect and defend the Constitution. They don’t even know what that means. But we took that stuff seriously.

Ella: What has it been like for you to see how much journalism has changed and declined in the decades since you were working as a journalist?

Penny: Painful. It’s painful. I have just resumed trying to watch the news. I recently canceled my subscription to the New York Times—and I’ve been a subscriber for over 50 years—because they have normalized the behavior of that fool who was the former president and all his sycophants. And I was on the verge of canceling my subscription to the Washington Post. But lately, it seems like they’ve grown a pair. I’ve been reading some stories, and it’s like, “Wow, is somebody really paying attention?” And so they really seem to be. I read the LA Times, but then the LA Times just fired all of its Black and brown reporters, so I don’t know how much longer I’m going to keep that up. I am horrified, I am terrified because a country where the press doesn’t respect what it means to have the power and the authority that the press has frightens me because who’s going to tell us what we need to know if it’s not the Fourth Estate? Yeah, I’m scared. I’m really scared.

PBS is about the only news that I can listen to on a regular basis and get some truth, some understanding of what’s going on. There’s a part of me that is glad I’m old. I’m glad that I don’t have to live through another 15 or 20 years of this. I’m not trying to die, mind you, but I’ve been here longer than I will continue to be here. And if this country keeps going the way it’s going, I can say I won’t cry when I have to leave here.

Ella: What have been some of the biggest changes that you’ve seen over your lifetime? In politics, in human rights, in anything?

Penny: The biggest change is in people’s willingness to ignore the truth. I don’t think that, even in the middle of the civil rights movement, the most virulent racist would have said, “Oh, well, that didn’t happen to them. There was no slavery.” They knew it happened. Their parents were there. Their parents were the slave owners. They would never have tried to say it didn’t happen. And now you have this rewriting of fact, of truth. You have people banning books from libraries. My mother was a librarian, and I am truly glad that she did not live to see this. It’s something I never would have thought possible. How do you ban a book? And not just a book, but a whole collection of books? You don’t like what they say, so [you say] we’re not going to teach it. Or, “My kid didn’t like this book because it made him ashamed to be white.” That really ranks among the stupidest things I’ve ever heard in my life. “It made him ashamed to be white.” No it didn’t. It may have made him think, “Oh my goodness. Do my people really do this?” Yes, son, they do. But you can stop it. You can make sure they don’t.

And I think we all have those things happen to us. We were just listening to whatever happened in the Super Bowl in Kansas City. And they have arrested some people. I would be willing to accept somebody saying they were probably Black. They probably were. And that hurts me to my heart. But I would never say, “Oh no, they weren’t Black.” Sure they were. I don’t like that that’s the truth. And I don’t like what is happening to young Black men in America. And it needs to stop. But to say that, “Oh, well, they’re not doing these things.” Yeah, they are. Somebody’s sons and grandsons who look like me are doing these things, and we gotta stop it.

Those are the things that upset me, that make me not feel so good, and that have me questioning really and truly what I do next. I’m going to keep writing books, but I want to feel like I’m doing something useful in my community. And I don’t know what that is. I don’t know at this point, and I’ve been discussing it with friends, all of us of a certain age. And I don’t have the answer. And if you have any thoughts, I’m happy to hear them.

Ella: What are some of the things you’ve talked about with your friends about what you can do and what you can’t do?

Penny: Well, one of my dearest friends [suggested having] Black history taught from Black churches? Because nobody can go into a Black church and go, “Oh, you can’t teach Black history.” They sure can. Try to stop them. I think that is as good an idea as I’ve heard. Now, we’ve got to figure out how to implement it. And you start with one church at a time, but you start with the churches that have been on the forefront. For instance, Abyssinian Baptist Church or Ebenezer—that’s in New York, that was Adam Clayton Powell’s church. Martin Luther King’s church in Atlanta. These places where the ministers made a difference. Teach Black history, and goodness knows there are enough teachers who will go in and teach those things and teach children. And all of these books that have been banned? Let’s go get them and let’s make them available in the Black churches. Nobody can tell them, “Oh, well, you can’t have any gay books in there.” Sure they can. They can do anything they want to do. And people can teach children what these things mean. Because there are gay people everywhere, and it ain’t a shock or a surprise, and it shouldn’t be. And if you don’t know any, you just think you don’t, maybe, you probably do. But [we need to teach children] how you interact with people. And you don’t call people names. No matter what the name is, whether it’s a racial or sexual epithet, you don’t talk to people that way. And that’s one of the best ideas I’ve heard. I don’t know how to make it happen, but I talk to people about it. I’ve mentioned it to several people, and everybody says, “Oh yeah, that’s a good idea. How do we do it?” I don’t know. So, Ella, if you got a thought about how we do this, I’m all ears.

Ella: I agree that it’s a great idea. And it seems, like you said, like something that would have to be each church at a time, but it seems like something where if you went and talked to a church in your community, then they would probably be able to pass it on among other churches that they’re affiliated with.

Penny: A church at a time. And maybe you pick a couple of cities. Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York City, Atlanta, where there are these very strong Black communities. And then, get entertainers involved because the civil rights movement was full of entertainers, singers, and writers, and people listened to them. Can you imagine if Beyoncé said, “Okay, I’m going to give a concert at Ebenezer Baptist Church,”—you wouldn't be able to get down the block. Because it's Beyoncé! I don’t know what she knows about history, but she could certainly be an advocate. Or whoever the hip-hop people are. You know, you get people involved.

Ella: Yeah, absolutely.


Part Two: Gay Rights, Writing, and Sinister Wisdom

Ella Stern: You talked a little bit about the banning of gay books. Can you talk to me about how you’ve seen queer rights change throughout your lifetime and where you think things are going in terms of queer rights?

Penny Mickelbury: Well, let’s start from the fact that when I was your age, we didn’t have any rights. And you did well to keep your sexual preferences and orientations to yourself. You could lose your job. Not “could”—you would lose your job, get kicked out of school. Some kids—and more than a few—got kicked out of their homes. There were no rights.

And there certainly weren’t any books. And I think that’s one of the most important differences. There was no place to learn about who you were. I knew I liked girls, but there was nobody to tell it to. Until, as I got older and left Atlanta and moved to Washington, I met other women like myself. But it was still just this small group of people. And it was to our advantage to keep that information to ourselves because we could all lose our jobs. We’d all be fired and there was nobody to talk to. There was no information.

And then, I learned about Lammas bookstore. The women’s bookstore; it was on Capitol Hill at that time. And I was sort of intimidated and afraid to go in there. I mean, I loved bookstores and I loved books, but how do I ask them, “Where are the books for those of us who love women?” Well, half the books in that store were books [for those of us who love women]. And the women who owned and ran the store offered information and help. I was out of college, I was working, and that was the first time I knew that there was a place to go.

And it has evolved to what we have now. Now, you say “LBGTQA” and some other stuff, [but] we didn’t know all that stuff. There were boys, and there were girls. And then there was another category, and we all knew who these people were, who were what we would now call transgender. We didn’t have a name [for that back then]. They just were as they were. And some of us were part of a social network that included those people, and some of us knew that there were places where they absolutely were not included or tolerated. And so we had our own discrimination within our own group. There were people that we discriminated against because they weren’t—and this is going to sound weird—they weren’t normal. What was normal? We’re not normal to most people. I mean, [are you] going to go to your job and go, “Oh, excuse me, would you like to meet my girlfriend?” I don’t think so. “Can I bring my girlfriend to the office Christmas party?” I don’t think so.

And so the change that exists now, we never could have imagined. We never could have imagined being able to be open and accepted in many places. Elected officials, gay judges and lawyers—what? We never would have [imagined] it. And being called, being able to say “queer” without it being a provocation, without it being a slam. You didn’t call anybody queer, you know? But within our community, we appropriated that term. I personally don’t like it for myself. I am a lesbian. But I’m not going to get mad at somebody because he says, “Okay, you go here with the queer people.” Okay, if I must, I will, but I’d much rather be where the girls are, you know, where are all the women? That’s where I want to be.

Ella: And what do you think are some of the most important things for society to keep doing in terms of gay rights? What are the places where we most need improvement?

Penny: Well, people have got to stand up en masse against this book-banning crap. And people have to not be afraid to normalize those people in their communities who are same-gender loving. Nobody said you had to be gay. You don’t have to. You don’t have to do anything. But you can’t stop me. And that’s what I think needs to happen: people need to stop being afraid, stop worrying about what somebody else thinks.

And this whole evangelical crap is just another way of giving people permission to discriminate against everybody—and they hate everybody. People need to start standing up [against] that. We [need to be] saying, “No. Not where I live. Not on my watch. No, I do not accept your position on this.” You can believe what you like, but you don’t have the right to inflict it on other people. I don’t care where you go to church, but you don’t get to preach your thing as a blanket, “This is the way because God said.” To whom? God told you of all the people God could tell something to? I don’t think so. Whatever God you believe in, she didn’t tell you. There were some other people she might have told, but not you. Everybody says we can’t criticize it. [But] we can, and we must. We’ve got to stop letting people get away with that crap. Because then it becomes normal. It’s the same thing as Trump and those fools. We have normalized this evangelical whatever-they-are. Ain’t nothing normal about that. What you believe is your business; I don’t want to hear it. I’m not trying to convert you to Buddhism. I'm a Buddhist, but that ain’t nobody’s business but mine. I’m not trying to convert you.

Ella: Yeah, absolutely. People who are using their religion to hate others are not using it right.

Penny: Absolutely. And there’s nothing normal about that. Why is religion in this conversation anyway?

Ella: Exactly. And you talked about the importance of fighting against the banning of LGBTQ+ books. Especially given that, how does it feel to be working on this Lesbian Stories edition of Sinister Wisdom?

Penny: There are times when I feel a little bit out of my element because all of these wonderful women that I’m working with have tremendous experience as editors. I’m comfortable holding my own among writers, but I’m not an editor. However, I can say that I have been edited by some of the best, so I know what it’s supposed to look like. Katherine Forrest was my first editor, and I am never too far away from her advice. And the editor that I have now at Bywater, Fay Jacobs—I would walk to Delaware [where she lives] if she said, “Look, we need to have a meeting, and I need for you to walk here.” That is how unwavering I am in my belief in her ability. She does what a good editor is supposed to do, which is help a writer make a better book. And I have Rachel and Katherine and Judith to guide me along the way if I feel like I’m out of my element. I am very, very happy to be a part of this effort.

Ella: This issue of Sinister Wisdom centers on how lesbians of different ages are building off of each other’s work and stories. How do you feel about that? What excites you about it?

Penny: I think it’s brilliant because that may be the best way, maybe even the only way, for me to access young lesbian writers. I don’t know any. And I certainly am not likely to encounter them in a social setting. We don’t hang out with the same people, not because we don’t like the same people, but they don’t hang out with people my age, and I don’t hang out with people your age. Even my nieces are older than you are. And the great-nieces are too young to be hanging out with anybody right now. And I think I can speak for my contemporaries [in that we would love to be introduced to and meet with young women writers.]

I’m excited about being able to read the writings [in Sinister Wisdom]. I want to know what [young writers] are thinking, if it’s any different than what I thought in my 20s. I’d love to be able to communicate with them, but in this format, most of my communicating will be with Catherine and Judith and Rachel because we will be talking about the work and what it’s saying. I have no idea what to expect. But I’m open to it, as are we all. We’re all of a different generation, but we love writing. And we were once 20- and 30-something, so we know how it felt to have somebody’s eyes on your work and [be] waiting for the judgment. I don’t think any of us have gotten so old that we have forgotten that, you know?

Ella: Yeah. And people of my generation don’t [often] get to talk to any older gay people, so it’s always really special to be able to do that and thank your generation for everything you did that gets us what we have today. I think there’s not nearly enough intergenerational communication about that sort of thing.

Penny: There isn’t. And I love hearing that from you. And I’m going to speak for myself, but I think I can also speak for Catherine and Judith: reach out. You know how to find us. And then ask us who else we know. “I know you know some more writers. Introduce me to some.” Happy to do that. Because it’s important for us to know that all that stuff, all those years, didn’t just vanish, evaporate. That people still read it, that young people are still reading and going, “Wow, that’s a pretty good story. Even if it is written by somebody older than my grandmother, [it’s] still a pretty good story.” So reach out, talk to us, let us know what you need to know.

Ella: That’s awesome. And one last conversation topic before we wrap up: can you tell me more about your career writing books? I feel like we’ve been circling around it this whole time.

Penny: Oh, my. My career writing books. I left journalism because it had become the news business and not the profession of journalism. Well, that ain’t what I signed up for. But writing has always been a part of my life. I mean, I’ve always written, always. So I’m going to try to write a book. And a friend of mine said to me, “Well, write a mystery because you read them all the time.” And I did. My parents read mysteries; I’ve been reading mysteries since I [was young]. So I said okay. And the first lesbian mystery I read was a Katherine Forrest book. I didn’t know lesbians wrote mysteries. And [from] the women’s bookstore in Westwood [called Sisterhood], [I] got a bunch of books by lesbians. I was like, “Holy crap. I didn’t know this existed.” And I have been at it ever since.

I've got 15 or 16 novels published, most of them lesbian-focused and lesbian-centered. But I know I am not everybody’s cup of tea. I don’t write romances, and I don’t write the easy way out because life just ain’t that easy for so many people. And people have told me they don’t want to talk [or hear] about this stuff. Okay. But it’s what I write. I was talking to a friend recently who was being published by one of the big lesbian presses that wrote a lot of romances, but she couldn’t get her book published because she was told—by the editor—that nobody wanted to read about young Black girls finding themselves as lesbians, as youngsters. And it didn’t bother her to say that to a Black writer. Well, there are lots of people who want to read about this.

I love writing it; I love reading it. When I used to teach, I loved teaching it. And I’m always on the lookout for a good writer. It’s like, “Where’s this story that I haven’t read, for somebody to give me?” That’s one of the reasons I’m really looking forward to this process. What are young people thinking about? What do you think about? What do you want to write about? And, [I know this] because I do it, you write about stuff you’d like to read about. So I’m looking forward to it.

Ella: Is there anything else you wanted to add?

Penny: I really do hope that you and the other young people in this program will reach out to us, that you will access us when you think we can be helpful. As I said before, I think I can speak for Catherine and Judith—and Rachel, although Rachel sees you guys on a regular basis because she teaches you—[in saying that] we not only want to hear from you, we need to hear from you. Most of us don’t have children and grandchildren. Unless we teach, we have no idea what you all are thinking, or what you’re feeling, or what you’re reading, or what you think about what we write. I’d love to know what you think about what I write. The issues that I write about [are faced by] everybody in this society. But if you’re not feeling represented, I’d love to know that. I really would. And tell your friends. If I’ve written a book and there’s a young person [in it] and you think I don’t know anybody who acts like this, please tell me. I’d like to know. I appreciate the opportunity to interact with young people and I miss being able to do it. I used to teach, [but] I don’t do that anymore. So I’d love to have the experience.

Ella: I’m hoping to read some of your books because I’ve been looking for more mysteries to read, so what better place to start?

Penny: Okay, well, mysteries I write, and historical fiction. That’s what I do now, is historical. So please read them, and let me know.

Ella: Awesome. I will. Thank you so much for your time. It’s been incredible to talk to you.

Penny: You’re very welcome. And please feel free to reach out anytime.

Ella: I will.

Ella Stern conducted this interview on February 14, 2024.


Penny Mickelbury is the author of 15 novels, a collection of short stories, and a contributor to half a dozen short story collections. She is a Lammy and Goldie finalist. She is the 2020 recipient of the Alice B Medal. She was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame in 2019.

Ella Stern (she/her) is a first-year student at Macalester College in St. Paul. She is interning for the upcoming “Lesbian Stories” issue of Sinister Wisdom. Ella loves writing, interviewing, intergenerational communication, and lesbians, and she has loved incorporating all of these into this project.