Felt in the Jaw
Kristen N. Arnett
Split/Lip Press, 2017, 220 pages
$16.00

Sarahland
Sam Cohen
Grand Central Publishing, 2021, 208 pages
$15.99

Rainbow Rainbow: Stories
Lydi Conklin
Catapult, 2023, 256 pages
$16.95

Reviewed by Grace Gaynor

Felt in the Jaw by Kristen Arnett, Sarahland by Sam Cohen, and Rainbow Rainbow by Lydi Conklin are short story collections linked by their representations of lesbian and queer identities through varying narrative styles and contexts. Each collection invests in a thorough examination of themes such as exploration, self-discovery, transformation, isolation, and connection. These common investigations build bridges between each of these vibrant collections, allowing their stories to stand out as unique examinations of identity.

Within each collection, exploration and self-discovery are represented through literal and figurative journeys. In Sarahland, characters are constantly searching for and finding new ways of expressing themselves and understanding the world. Readers are invited on this exploratory expedition through the lush, second-person narration of “Dream Palace,” the fourth piece in the collection. The narrator of “Dream Palace” places the reader within the story by simply stating, “Now you are Sarah. Here you go, driving down the highway…” (91) and later saying, “You’re running away, untethered, a girl and her car and a thousand dollars you’ve saved from tips. You want to start over you think and why not do it this way” (91). As we travel within the enormous building that is the Dream Palace, we are oriented to the experiences of a Sarah, becoming intrinsically embedded in the world of Sarahland. Similarly, “Playing Fetch,” from Felt in the Jaw uses the second-person to send the reader on the journey of coping with grief. As the characters discover life after loss, the reader is required to adjust at the same pace, as the narrative seamlessly immerses readers into the life and perspective of Danielle, the narrator.

Self-discovery is a central theme in Rainbow Rainbow, particularly in the story “Pioneer.” Coco, a fifth-grade student who has always felt inherently different from those around her, experiences moments of clarity as she goes through a simulation of the Oregon Trail with her classmates. Though she may not have the exact words to describe her realizations, the story culminates with Coco’s understanding that her journey of self-discovery is just beginning: “Really, the end of the simulation was just the beginning. Coco knew that now. Not even Ms. Harper could help her. She pulled away and turned to face the yellow field, the milkweed, the curved path of cones. The sun was a low white hole in the sky. She would go on her journey now. She would set off” (108). In this moment, Coco realizes that her survival depends on her willingness to explore the reality of her gender nonconformity and identity. She understands she must embrace the things that disconnect and differentiate her from her peers.

Connection and isolation are explored at length in each collection, as these themes often serve as the foundation of narratives centered on lesbian and queer identities. In one instance, Felt in the Jaw’s “Blessing of the Animals” depicts the difficulty of isolation as Moira is severed from her church family and lifelong dream of a large, conventional wedding when her pastor casually refuses to perform a traditional ceremony for her and her partner. The narrative quietly represents the feelings of loneliness and isolation that come with embracing queer identity, while emphasizing the value of gaining sustenance from acceptance and connection through images of Moira’s supportive partnership.

This theme of sustenance through connection is similarly explored within “Pink Knives,” the third story in Rainbow Rainbow. The narrative opens with the following images: “We meet in the plague. Your gray roots have grown out four or five inches into the red—we’re that deep in. We sit on opposite hips of a circle printed on the grass in a crowded public park in San Francisco” (57). The narrator, after describing the circumstances in which the two main characters meet, discusses those around them in a swirl of connection, at odds with the aforementioned “plague”:

Around us are first-date kisses, teens huddled dangerously close together on tarps, techies dancing to rubberized jewel-toned radios. Everyone massing into Dolores Park for whatever they need: sex, friendship, family, work meetings, chess lessons, air, rigorous jump rope, letting their toddlers scream like wolves, pudgy arms extended, anticipating a fall (57).

Against a backdrop of isolation imposed by uncertainty and illness, the main character makes connections that provide them with new insight into the reality of their gender identity. In this way, Rainbow Rainbow’s “Pink Knives” is a story about queer survival and the ways isolation and connection, though often at odds with each other, might work in tandem to provide us with self-knowledge.

Connection is further explored in Sarahland’s “Exorcism, or Eating My Twin,” as Cohen explores the formation of an intense bond between two characters. The narrator, Sarah, speaks intensely about her “twin,” whom she has renamed Tegan: “It turned out, of course, that we’d both been solitary children, obsessed with Stephen King and Tori Amos. We’d both grown up lying on quilted girlbeds biting our cuticles and feeling an intense sense of missing, of pining for a twin” (70). These perceived similarities between the two characters escalate Sarah’s feelings of attachment and dependence. When the seemingly sudden severance of the connection forces her to exist on her own once again, she struggles to make a life outside of her relationship with Tegan. The emphasis placed upon this struggle makes this narrative a contemplation of the ways isolation and connection work together to create charged relationships imbued with unwieldy power.

Each collection also explores the way long-term relationships and the people within them transform over time. Felt in the Jaw’s “Aberrations in Flight” depicts a growing distance between two partners set against a backdrop of death and the complications associated with house renovation, which magnify the tedium within the relationship. As the story comes to a close, the narrator, Amber, realizes that her partner, Elizabeth, is no longer the person she fell in love with and asks: “How do you reconcile loving two different versions of a person?” (188). The first story in Rainbow Rainbow, “Laramie Time,” seeks to answer this question in the context of the uncertainty and doubt embedded in their struggling relationship. Leigh, the story’s narrator, is torn between continuing her difficult relationship or coping with the pain of leaving a person she loves, a turmoil represented when she says: “This person had lied to me. She was happier than she could admit; she was thriving. My heart lifted for her joy, even if it was separate from me” (28). In the end, the dissolution of the partnership allows the story to stand out as a meditation on the impact of insurmountable change on a relationship.

“Becoming Trees,” the eighth story in Sarahland, opens with a line that centers on the pressure associated with transformation: “It began in the season when everyone was changing” (155). The narrator discusses the tension related to this overwhelming sense of change, noting that “it seemed like everyone was wrapping themselves in chrysali and having late-in-life emergences as different kinds of creatures, and what this made clear was that we weren’t becoming anything. We felt like caterpillars who didn’t know that being a caterpillar wasn’t the endgame” (155). This lack of becoming dramatically impacts the narrative’s main couple, Jan and Sarah, who feel inadequate in their lives and relationships as normal people. Soon, they make the decision to trade in their physical bodies and become trees, hoping to strengthen their relationship and escape the expectations of a rigid society. In the same way, the stories within Sarahland transform and shift the expectations associated with traditional narrative structures and systems. Retellings, recastings, and refusals support the queer power of this collection.

Each of these story collections hold valuable perspectives on human experience, most notably in the context of identity and connection. The experience of reading these collections comparatively might allow readers to gain new understandings of themselves and others.

Grace Gaynor is a writer from Louisville, Kentucky. She earned her BA in English from Hollins University and is currently an MFA student studying creative writing at Virginia Tech. She is a Sinister Wisdom intern and serves as an editor for the minnesota review and SUNHOUSE Literary.

Still Alive
LJ Pemberton
Malarkey Books, 2024, 290 pages
$19.00

Reviewed by Rae Theodore

LJ Pemberton’s Still Alive is a raw, evocative exploration of love, self-discovery, and the relentless quest for meaning against the backdrop of a fractured American landscape. The novel traces the tumultuous journey of V, a bisexual temp worker whose life is intricately entangled with Lex, a butch painter. Pemberton’s narrative deftly captures the poignant complexities of V’s relationships and personal growth, weaving a story that is both deeply intimate and widely resonant.

From the moment V meets Lex at an underground punk show, their chemistry ignites a whirlwind romance that drives much of the novel’s emotional core. “We’re waiting and she says her name is Lex. The x trips off like every other name is lacking without it” (17). Pemberton’s prose is both lyrical and incisive, capturing the dynamics of love, heartbreak, and obsession. I found myself going back and re-reading sentences to let the words roll around on my tongue a little longer.

Lex, with her artistic flair and strong presence, becomes a central figure in V’s search for stability and identity. “There was poetry in the way she carried groceries from the store. There was meaning in the way she ignored responsibility. I wanted her. I wanted to be her. I barely knew myself,” V acknowledges (22).

However, their on-again, off-again relationship is far from idyllic, punctuated by the dysfunction of V’s family, which looms over her like a specter. “The problem is I know how it all ends, in blood and quiet, and I learned that final lesson when I was too young to know what was routine and what was unusual and how everyone mixes up the two,” V says (276).

In parallel, the novel examines V’s relationship with Leroy, her gay best friend, who has chosen a more serene rural existence. Leroy’s peaceful life serves as a foil to V’s restless pursuit of meaning, highlighting her internal conflict and dissatisfaction. Pemberton skillfully portrays V’s inability to find contentment, whether in the structured routines of temp work or the conventional expectations of mainstream life.

Pemberton’s narrative is not merely a chronicle of V’s romantic entanglements and family discord–it’s also a profound meditation on the search for personal freedom and authenticity. V’s restless journey across the United States from New York City to Portland to Los Angeles symbolizes her broader quest for self-fulfillment and a life defined on her terms.

Still Alive is a modern-day Rubyfruit Jungle that will resonate with anyone who has ever grappled with finding their place in a world that seems perpetually at odds with their true self. If you’ve rarely found yourself represented in a book, you just might catch a glimpse of yourself in Pemberton’s.

Rae Theodore (she/they) is the author of the memoir collections Leaving Normal and My Mother Says Drums Are for Boys and the poetry chapbook How to Sit Like a Lesbian. She is the story curator for the new anthology Swagger: A Celebration of the Butch Experience.

The Italy Letters
Vi Khi Nao
Melville House, 2024, 192 pages
$18.99

Reviewed by Lara Mae Simpson

A broke writer living in a small apartment in Las Vegas, caring for her ailing mother while crafting long, emotional letters to her Italian lover in London, who’s married to a man. . . The premise of The Italy Letters sounds like an irresistible, unrequited sapphic love story–but the delivery feels more like wading through a depressive episode, with nothing but moments of beautiful prose to keep you afloat.

The Italy Letters plunges you right into the narrator’s stream of consciousness with no mercy. This wandering narrative style allows Vi Khi Nao to explore a wide range of pertinent, contemporary issues—as well as the narrator’s overarching desire—in a way that reflects the overwhelming nature of our modern-day life. Whether this translates well into an epistolary form, however, is uncertain. The novel is ostensibly a series of letters, but as the present-tense narrative (addressed to ‘you’) shifts between letter-writing and ‘writing’ through back-and-forth texts, the result is disorienting.

Through the fog of the narrator’s turbulent mind, what stands out are Nao’s insightful reflections on relationships and complex societal issues. Money is a key theme in the novel, and Nao shows how poverty makes every part of life near-impossible, from trying to make it as a writer when tickets to writers’ events are extortionate, to always losing teaching jobs at the university to white men. Money also casts a dark cloud over the narrator’s relationships–she struggles to care for her mother, not only because of her mother’s constant suicidal ideation, but also because she gambles all her money away. Her behaviour creates endless stress and guilt for her daughter, who then feels forced to write and publish as much as possible in case it makes any money. Furthermore, the narrator finds herself exploited by her best friend–in exchange for cheap rent, she does all the cooking and cleaning for her friend, is kept at home by her and not allowed to socialise with others, and is made to have uncomfortable sex with her.

When the narrator isn’t making incisive critiques about inequality—on both a societal and personal scale—she spends a lot of time trying to suppress her desire for her lover. The erotics of this novel are also a highlight–as suggested by the book’s cover, depicting a naked body holding a lemon between breast and arm. The narrator is unafraid to write about how her clitoris feels and to describe in-depth her dreams about having forbidden sex with her married lover. There is also a deep romance running through the novel—inherent in the art of writing letters, of course—and the moments of fondness and longing from across countries and time zones are often touching. The experience of loving a woman who loves a man is a very universal lesbian experience.

However, I wouldn’t have been left feeling so empty after reading this book if these lesbian love letters had more of a sense of direction. I love stream-of-consciousness narratives and how they can almost truly represent our chaotic minds, but Nao’s lack of structure did not land for me here. Perhaps the title—The Italy Letters—misled me, as I kept waiting for the lover to be in Italy, but she’s only ever in London, with the narrator in the US. The lover being Italian is only mentioned a handful of times. The only thing that breaks up the narrator’s letters is when she changes location–from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, for example. Perhaps if the novel was moving somewhere solid rather than ambling around like one’s thoughts in a journal, it would be more hard-hitting.

While The Italy Letters has instances of beauty, perceptive commentary, and even comedy, it did not resonate with me overall. However, it is clear that Nao is a highly talented writer, and I look forward to checking out more of her work and seeing where she grows from here.

Lara Mae Simpson (they/she) is a poet, writer, and editor based in London. Their work has been published by The Poetry Society, fourteen poems, Queerlings, and more. They were Literature Editor at STRAND Magazine, and they are currently Poetry Editor at Phi Magazine and part of The Writing Squad. You can see more of their work at www.laramae.com.

The Avian Hourglass
Lindsey Drager
Dzanc Books, 2024, 212 pages
$17.95

Reviewed by Sara Youngblood Gregory

Author and professor Lindsey Drager’s latest novel, The Avian Hourglass, is a kaleidoscopic, rigorous, and sometimes disorienting movement through speculative fiction and surrealism.

Written in the first person, the novel follows an unnamed narrator struggling to manage her life in a small, sometimes claustrophobic town. The narrator is a bus driver but dreams of becoming a radio astronomer, dutifully studying to take the exam she has already failed four times. Meanwhile, she acts as the legal guardian to triplets—children she gave birth to as a gestational surrogate but whose parents died in a car accident before the novel’s opening. As if this weren’t enough, the narrator, her children, and a patchwork of town folks must grapple with The Crisis, a looming and insistently vague upheaval that disappears birds, covers the stars, and acts as a stand-in for environmental and political degradation and emotional estrangement.

However, if you are expecting a typical end-of-the-world novel about loneliness, climate change, and the human spirit, The Avian Hourglass is a different beast entirely. Rather than focus on the material pursuits of apocalypse—like food or pollution or gathering supplies—Drager is concerned with emotional and linguistic sustenance. The narrator frequently considers etymology, memory, birds’ nests, planets, and legends with an almost orbital obsession.

Near the novel’s opening, the narrator shares some of these stream-of-conscious, cyclical thoughts:

“Luce tells me the world effect comes from the Old French and Latin for completion, result, accomplishment, and ending. Intent, she says, comes from intend, which in Old French means to stretch or extend. The problem is this: the idea of having intention—the idea of having control over effects by altering their causes—seems silly when my deja vu confirms for me that every move I make was meant to be. This is how I know I’ll pass the test” (18).

At times, these musings are arresting—at others confusing—but perhaps all the more powerful for it. All in all, The Avian Hourglass is a compelling, intellectual, and emotionally-charged take on climate fiction.

Sara Youngblood Gregory is a lesbian journalist and poet. She serves on the board of directors for Sinister Wisdom.

Private Rites
Julia Armfield
Flatiron Books, 2024, 304 pages
$27.99

Reviewed by Catherine Horowitz

When will you know that the apocalypse has arrived? When will the realization come that we’ve progressed too far in destroying the world to reverse it? Julia Armfield’s speculative novel Private Rites is a vivid depiction of an apocalypse of the mundane, where people make gradual adjustments to the world’s worsening conditions, ultimately doing what it takes to continue their lives around it.

In the world of Private Rites, there is heavy rainfall every day, with only a few minutes of respite. Water levels continue to rise. People live on the upper floors of collapsing high-rise buildings and take public boats to work, while the wealthy flee to less affected areas and use advanced technology to delay being impacted. This didn’t happen all at once; it was a gradual decline, with fewer and fewer sunny days until people were stuck trying to remember the last sunburn they had.

Amid this, Isla, Irene, and Agnes must navigate the death of their father and their own strained relationships. Isla is a high-strung eldest daughter, Irene is short-tempered, and Agnes, ten years younger than her sisters, is distant and impossible to reach. Their father was an acclaimed architect who designed many of the buildings adapted to the rising water levels but was absent and sometimes cruel to his daughters. The sisters are forced together when he dies and find themselves entrenched in conflicts both familial and widespread.

At its core, Private Rites is a beautiful and lifelike depiction of sibling and family relationships and their complexities. It puts words to facets of sibling relationships I hadn’t thought to name, like the “strange back-dated nature of the things [siblings] choose to know” about you and how uniquely frustrating this is.

There is another layer of complexity as well: how to navigate one’s personal life during the literal apocalypse. Is it worth it to try to work through relationships or to grow as a person when the ocean could rise about your apartment any day? Although our world may not feel quite as dire as this one, it can still be challenging to balance both one’s personal life and the fact that the planet is burning and people are suffering in a much more pressing way.

Armfield is also a thoughtful and meticulous world-builder, constructing a landscape that extends far beyond the confines of the book. The world-building goes down to the smallest details, like the fact that people drink chicory coffee because coffee beans can’t grow anymore, cremations are mandated by law since it’s impossible to bury bodies, and the cleaner, more controlled suburbs are called the “millponds.” The landscape of Private Rites is as important as its plot, and Armfield makes it feel both real and terrifyingly feasible.

While Private Rites starts off slow-paced, focusing primarily on its three protagonists and their histories, relationships, and daily lives, Armfield scatters hints throughout the landscape that something more catastrophic is coming. This sense of anticipation grows gradually throughout the book, which turns from a slice-of-life novel set at the end of the world into a thriller. For the last third of the book, I couldn’t put it down.

There is also the King Lear element of the book, which is labeled as a “speculative reimagining.” The parallels are clear: a powerful father dies and causes conflict in dividing his properties among his three daughters. The youngest daughter is the clear outlier. Tense familial relationships lead to destruction. I wouldn’t exactly call Private Rites a reimagining, though; I would say it exists in conversation with King Lear. The plots diverge in ways that sometimes feel like deliberate inversions but more often feel unrelated. It might be a fun exercise for someone familiar with both texts to further interpret them in comparison, drawing out thematic parallels and significant differences. Ultimately, though, while knowledge of King Lear might be rewarding in some ways, it isn’t necessary to understand Private Rites and its larger themes.

Private Rites is a thoughtful, moving book that intertwines a personal story with a larger climate catastrophe. Although thrilling and fast-paced at the end, its larger world and multifaceted characters are what make it powerful. It’s also a masterful representation of rain and wateriness; I’ve never felt more relieved to emerge into hot, sunny weather.

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.

Cecilia
K-Ming Chang
Coffee House Press, 2024, 144 pages
$14.95

Reviewed by Darla Tejada

Reading Cecilia was like suffering an ingrown toenail that causes blood and pus to ooze from tender flesh, concocting a putrid stench that haunts the nostrils as much as the pain of a pierced toe haunts the foot. I’ll stop with the figurative dramatics, though, if you enjoy that kind of writing, this novella by K-Ming Chang might just be for you.

Told through (or unfolding in the mind of) the main character and narrator, Seven, Cecilia is about that universal lesbian experience: the obsession with our first ‘situationship.’

Let me sing my praises before I turn you off the work. Chang triumphs in how she depicts and weaves together those forces in our lives that live just beyond the tangible. The sublimation—through Chang’s surreal prose—of cultural expectations, familial tensions and self-repressions that Seven experiences lend the story an almost instinctual telling. It is as if Seven’s “objective” reality, filtered through their perspective, was distilled into its purest (and therefore most visceral and animal) form. By dissolving the divide between internal and external, Cecilia’s reality becomes a new plane of existence—a third place resulting from the cross-contamination between the physical world and the psyche.

To read Cecilia is to step into Seven’s skin. This intimacy with Seven’s interiority makes the narrative more immediate. I felt the familial claustrophobia of an immigrant family whose embrace is as comforting as it is suffocating. I recognised those same bonds between Seven and their Ma and Ama—that cutting comfort between the women in the family. I yearned, just as Seven did, for “a boyhood for my bones” (65). Chang rends the stereotype of the submissive and docile Asian woman, with Seven even perceiving themself as a predator and consistently transgressing the bounds of appropriate feminine behaviours and desires.

Ultimately, though, I thought that Cecilia was better as a short story. The narrative was mired in a futile orbit, prolonged for the sake of semantical experimentation. I am, however, doubtful of this experiment’s success. Chang’s evocations of obsession were more iterative than generative. Each analepsis neither provided us with greater insight on just what made Seven so enamoured by and beholden to Cecilia—other than the fact that Cecilia was a manic pixie ‘Quirky Girl’—nor gave new insight or perspective on dyke yearning/co-dependency.

The only discernible progression in the narrative was that Seven licked Cecilia’s sweat in the first part of the book and then eventually consumed a speck of Cecilia’s shit towards the end of it. Perhaps a commentary about the repulsiveness of an all-consuming, unrequited sapphic love? Even Seven’s realisation that they might be the prey falls flat. The story is in Seven’s focalisation, so the reader recognises that there is a naiveté in them that is particularly un-predator-like, and very little resistance or interrogation opposed what Cecilia says and does.

But despite this less-than-positive introduction to Chang’s written work, I’m still keen to read more of her.

Darla Tejada is a Filipino reader and writer based in Naarm. Her work has been published by Archer Magazine online and Kill Your Darlings (KYD), among others. You can find her reading queer books on the 58 tram, going for aimless walks, and eating camembert stuffed croissants.

How It Works Out
Myriam Lacroix
The Overlook Press, 2024, 240 pages
$27.00

Reviewed by Pelaya Arapakis

Myriam Lacroix’s exhilarating debut novel How It Works Out follows a sapphic love story spanning a series of alternate realities. At the centre of the novel are Myriam and Allison—two lovers who meet at a show in a run-down punk house in Vancouver. How It Works Out is guided by the question of “what if?” catapulting protagonists into a range of radically different hypothetical scenarios that present various outcomes to their relationship. With each chapter, a new setting is imagined. What if Myriam and Allison discovered an abandoned baby in an alley, named him Jonah, and raised him as their own? What if the only way to treat Myriam’s depression was cannibalism? What if Myriam and Allison were a dog and praying mantis who fell in love? What if the pair became a micro-celebrity couple after releasing a self-help book on lesbian relationships?

A work of autofiction, How It Works Out blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy. We bear witness to love blossoming and waning, moving through the rose-tinted, dream-like highs of early romance to the various states of relationship decay. As the novel progresses, scenarios become marked by a pervasive darkness that coincides with the gradual unravelling of the relationship. Throughout it all, Lacroix anchors us with her precise and lyrical prose that testifies to her literary origins as a poet.

In and amongst the satirically absurd backdrops is a striking vulnerability as the characters excavate their interior and exterior worlds in the search for clarity, emotional truth, and authenticity. In the chapter “How It Works Out,” Myriam confides in an ex-partner, “I love Allison…I want us to be right for each other” (70). Her heart-rending admission recalls an often difficult truth: love and compatibility are not always in harmony. These moments of fragility are again echoed in “Anthropocene,” where Myriam—addressing Allison—delivers the achingly omniscient line, “How many times do I have to let you go?” (190).

How It Works Out is an intoxicating and visceral journey filled with queer possibility, offering readers a surreal, witty, and poignant tapestry of the potentialities and pitfalls of love. It is a love story that is as unique as it is unforgettable.

Pelaya Arapakis (she/her) is a Sinister Wisdom intern based in Naarm/Melbourne. She is also a musician, cultural worker and freelance writer.

Desert Haven
Penelope Starr
Rattling Good Yarns Press, 2024, 234 pages
$18.95

Reviewed by Sandra Butler

Penelope Starr is a gatherer of stories. Founder of Odyssey Storytelling, a community storytelling event now celebrating its twentieth year, she understands how our stories illuminate the commonalities of our lesbian lives while leaving lots of room for the unique and distinct way each woman makes and lives her choices. I was grateful to enter the world of women’s land with her as my guide. Starr is a lesbian equipped not with theories, hypotheses, or assumptions but with curiosity and admiration for the choices and experiences of the landdykes who come to life on these pages.

There has been much written analyzing, theorizing, and assessing the history of lesbians returning to live on the land, but very little from inside the lived experience of the lesbians themselves. The fifteen stories in Desert Haven introduce us to a wonderfully varied mix of women, each deserving of their own novel, and together, they blend into an ever-shifting patchwork of personalities, relationships, and communal life.

Originally conceived as a documentary film for which Starr did dozens of in-depth interviews, the means to create the documentary fell through; several of the women died or moved away, and others decided they didn’t want to be public. Starr took the raw material she had gathered and wrote a novel, Desert Haven, inspired by these lesbians and told their stories to a readership eager for them. She introduces us to this constantly shifting cast of characters in a series of first-person stories, helping us understand their motivations and need to be part of an all-lesbian environment that would support and nurture their lives.

The work at Desert Haven was unrelenting, and the resources were few. The decision to choose a financially marginal, physically demanding, and fiercely idealistic life took courage. Why did they come? What had they left behind, and what did they find in this new community with other women who had moved off the conventional grid to a life entirely away from the dominant culture in a world of their own making?

Some were fleeing abusive family lives, searching for direction and meaning; others were passionately separatist dykes, women who wanted a world without men and were hungry to come to rest in an all-women’s space. Some women moved to Desert Haven, put down roots and pulled them up again after a few seasons to move on to their next adventure. Each was dedicated to living life on her own terms and prepared to pay whatever price was required to do that. We watch them move in and out of relationships, fall fiercely in love, become friends, break up, or form lasting family bonds. We listen to their firmly held beliefs about equalizing resources and responsibilities and differing opinions about trans women on the land. Community meetings were alternately cooperative and contentious, and rituals were revered by some and dismissed by others. The honoring of Mother Earth was an organizing principle, even as the land was in an ongoing state of order and disorder.

The scaffolding for these stories is provided by JoJo, the welcoming and stabilizing woman who bought this piece of land and held it for any lesbian who needed to be there. We follow the ever-changing cast of characters from Dee, who arrived in 1977, to JoJo’s death in 2014 when her daughter-by-choice inherits this historic bit of land and is left to imagine what the future might look like. Luckily for us, Starr is working on that!

I remember those days in my own lesbian-feminist life. The urgency, the passion, and the commitment to making a life that would honor, value, and support every woman–whether we agreed with her or not! It was hard work then and continues to be hard work now. Yet it’s what is required of us as we dykes dream and imagine and create. I am grateful for Starr’s stories and these women. I saw a bit of myself in nearly all of them and marveled at their doggedness, their trust in one another, and the ways they created the dream of a different future in their lives.

Sandra Butler writes about whatever is still unspoken in women’s lives. The Kitchen is Closed: And Other Benefits Of Being Old is a collection of the musings of an old lesbian-feminist. Leaving Home at 83 will be published in October 2024.

Carmilla
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, edited by Carmen Maria Machado
Lanternfish Press, 2019, 160 pages
$17.00
Originally published in The Dark Blue, 1871-1872, 139 pages

Reviewed by Chloe Weber

You may be familiar with the “lesbian vampire” narrative, one repeated in numerous books, films, and other forms of media. But from where did this narrative originate? Many argue that Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu set the stage for many of the lesbian and sapphic vampires we see today.

Carmilla, originally published as a serial in the London-based literary magazine The Dark Blue and later reprinted by Le Fanu in In A Glass Darkly (1872), predates its more famous counterpart, Dracula, by over twenty years. This novel is set in nineteenth-century Styria, a federal state of Austria, and follows teen protagonist Laura as she becomes acquainted with a strange new houseguest, Carmilla.

However, before the story begins, in the prologue of Carmilla, we learn that Laura has already passed away. This story is recounted as a case study by a man named Doctor Hesselius, who claims he corresponded with Laura, where she spoke in detail about her experiences with the vampire Carmilla. This correspondence was long presumed fictional until 1973, when Dr. Jane Leight uncovered within LeFanu’s study a stack of correspondence between a doctor and a woman called only “V.”

If we assume Laura and Doctor Hesselius are real, what of the vampire Carmilla, and what of the obviously queer relationship between the two women? Most scholars would say the lesbianism of Laura and Carmilla is no fiction. In fact, the letters written by V. are said to contain even more detail of her desire for Carmilla than what made it into Le Fanu’s manuscript. The truth is much more devastating: Carmilla is a story about “a young woman’s sexual awakening; [and] the senseless slaughter of her supposed defiler” (Carmen Maria Machado, vi).

Going into the novel with these considerations, I found Carmilla read less like a gothic horror and more like a story about queerness itself, with lesbianism as the focus. Carmilla lays her claim on Laura only moments after their first meeting, seeing it as fate bringing them together once more, as they both recall a shared “dream” of meeting as children. What follows is a tale in which Laura attempts to resist Carmilla’s various charms and claims on her life, brushing off her declarations of love as simple hysteria. Laura prefers to view Carmilla’s love as part of her weak countenance rather than accept her lesbianism. Carmilla experiences hours of apathy followed by ones of intense love, which she inflicts upon Laura, saying, “You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one forever.” Laura describes the behavior, “like the ardor of a lover; it embarrassed me…” (37).

Laura’s eventual sexual awakening towards Carmilla comes when she is pierced in the breast by a beastly figure, later revealed to be Carmilla in a vampiric form. Following this strange occurrence, Laura believes her health is declining rapidly, and she describes attraction towards Carmilla as one of her primary symptoms. Laura even describes an orgasm experienced in a dreamlike state as she imagines sensations of a woman kissing up to her throat (69).

The only solution to Laura’s afflicted state is to eliminate the source of her woes, as she discovers evidence that Carmilla is actually an immortal vampire named Millarca. Laura still longs to find Carmilla safe, despite the evidence and even as the object of her desire is staked and beheaded. This confirms that Laura’s lesbianism is not something that will go away, and it cannot be cured as if it were some malicious malady.

It is not a far-fetched assumption that the real Carmilla, a woman named Marcia, was not a vampire as described by V. but a simple lesbian. Thanks to Le Fanu, Marcia is immortalized as a vampiric monster rather than just a human who stole a wealthy girl’s affection.

What modern-day readers should take away from Carmilla is that their lesbianism is not a supernatural curse and that they may live freely and openly rather than live in fear of their identity. Laura’s, or V.’s, suppression of desire caused an unnatural amount of pain: it is possible that if these two women had embraced their love instead, their story might have ended differently.

Chloe Weber is a Sinister Wisdom intern for the May 2024 season, located remotely in Montclair, New Jersey. She attends Macalester College as a student of English and Anthropology, always on the hunt to expand her literary knowledge.

Cities of Women
Kathleen B. Jones
Keylight Books, 2024, 288 pages
$16.99

Reviewed by Dot Persica

Cities of Women by Kathleen B. Jones begins with a beautiful premise: it is a book dedicated to all the women artists who have been made invisible. Her love for and commitment to historic lesbians is clear and indubitable from the very beginning, and it shapes her narration.

Jones has much in common with Verity Frazier, the protagonist—a disillusioned academic whose curiosity is rekindled by Christine de Pizan, or rather by the suspicion that the hand responsible for the artwork in her manuscripts may have belonged to a woman artist called Anastasia. This idea propels a journey in search of the truth (as a native Italian speaker, the choice to name her Verity, veritas, is a little bit on the nose, but I imagine for readers who aren’t accustomed to Latinisms this is more subtle), as Verity is dying to unearth tangible proof of her theory.

What counts as fact is open to question—Verity speaks these words to her ex, Regina, with whom she has a strange (alas normal in lesbian terms) friendship. The incessant search for the real truth behind the accepted, dogmatic “truth” defines this book and the queer experience: what are we if not love’s archaeologists, tirelessly digging for proof that we aren’t the first or the only people to have loved the way we love, in the face of the world telling us that we are solitary exceptions?

Some descriptions of Verity’s amazement when interacting with valuable artifacts during her research reminded me of my experience at the Lesbian Herstory Archives—to touch the texture of the past, as Kathleen B. Jones says, provides a closeness to the subject that just can’t compare to simply reading about it, and the author succeeds in describing it as an almost religious experience.

Readers are accompanied back and forth between Verity’s present day and Christine’s late medieval Europe, both studded with political considerations about two eras that at first glance couldn’t seem more different but have much in common, touching on modern gentrification and its predecessors, the ever-present corruption of Church and State, and misogyny. The narration spans multiple characters’ points of view: an ambitious choice which is definitely called for in a book like this, though it’s not always executed smoothly.

To me, the author seemed more comfortable and truthful when writing in heightened language, leaving me with a feeling that she was holding back, almost restraining herself when writing in a more modern style. This made me yearn to be catapulted back into the thirteenth century.

Altogether, I thought the concept was wonderful, though very difficult to concretize.

I did not think it was unrealistic for Verity to encounter someone with the same name as the woman she was researching: Anastasia. As a lesbian whose existence is constantly altered by unbelievable coincidences, and who has observed the same in her lesbian friends’ lives, I found this a perfectly accurate, reasonable, and frankly quite brilliant form of representation.

As lesbians, every event in our existence is somehow brought on by strange forces we can’t define, and maybe it’s none other than our Lesbian Ancestors having their way with our little lives. I think this book captures that.

Dot Persica (any pronouns) is a lesbian performer born in Naples, Italy. They are a classically trained soprano with a vague dance background; they have experience directing opera, helping out here and there on film sets, and doing stand-up. They are a co-founder of the Italian lesbian+ collective STRASAFFICA*, with which they have organized community events, raised funds, and created beautiful bonds. They also write poetry, like all lesbians.