The Inauguration of LGBT Rights

  BY KI THOMPSON

I always get goose bumps each time I watch a presidential inauguration, but never have I felt such emotion as I did yesterday with the second inaugural of Barack Obama.

Photo by Kathi Isserman

Of course Obama’s first inauguration was historic in its own right, and was made more so by being the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln – a milestone acknowledged by the use of the Lincoln bible during the swearing-in. The symbolism and promise in that moment made me so proud to be an American. This second inaugural had its own share of milestones: the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the installation of the statue of Freedom atop the Capitol building, the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s, “I have a dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial as well as the fact that it was MLK Day.

Photo by Kathi Isserman

But for me, the emotion came not from these symbols but from the words of the President’s speech when he noted the struggles from Seneca Falls and Selma to Stonewall. I was especially moved by his reference to the Declaration of Independence that if we are all created equal, then surely that must include gays and lesbians. And if we are equal, then our love must also be equal. This as the justices of the Supreme Court, about to hear the important cases on this very issue, sat nearby. Most of us remember a time when being in the closet was de rigueur, and some of us are still there because of our jobs or for other reasons. These words from the President of the United States will be forever enshrined in the pantheon of historic moments in our nation’s ongoing struggle for civil rights.

BSBers at Baltimore Pride

I was married three years ago in Washington, DC because it was not legal to do so in my home state. Last year, the legislature in the state of Maryland passed a law making it legal and recognizing same-sex marriages performed in other states. This incredible achievement was marred by a referendum aimed at overturning the law through the ballot. Fortunately the referendum was defeated by voters in November and effective January 1^st same-sex couples are able to marry in the state. In addition to DC, there are now 9 states that perform same-sex marriages. Let’s hope those justices take the President’s words to heart as they take on the Defense of Marriage Act.

As we move forward over the next four years and beyond, I have a renewed sense of hope in the future of our country. I feel the tide of change shifting as more Americans open their hearts and minds to the gay community, welcoming us to the patchwork quilt of diversity that has always been America and makes us stronger. And while I know we still have a long road ahead of us, I recall the words of Dr. King who said, “Commit yourself to the noble struggle for equal rights. You will make a greater person of yourself, a greater nation of your country, and a finer world to live in.”

Photo by Kathi Isserman

The Power of Storytelling

By Shelley Thrasher

Once upon a time, at a family picnic, my teenage sister Tami and I sat on a homemade quilt under towering pines and discussed synchronicity. I was fresh from studying theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and she was in love with Paul McCartney and the revolutionary Beatles. Neither of us had a very sophisticated understanding of the concept, but we finally concluded that events in the present can influence not only the future but the past. That theory underlies my reason for writing my novel The Storm.

I wanted my grandmother and her fifth son, Wendell, to have a happier life, so I took pieces from the past and made up a story in which they did. Will it work, you ask. I have no idea. But telling their stories has certainly influenced mine.

I never much believed in Santa Claus. It was evident early on that my parents sacrificed to buy me the baby doll I didn’t want and the Roy Rogers pistols I did. But Santa Claus and synchronicity are similar: if you believe in them, they’ll affect your life in positive ways.

My mother and I have never talked a lot, though we’ve spent hours working side by side, mostly in the kitchen cooking and cleaning up. However, when she started telling me her family stories, and I began to really listen to them, we found a topic of conversation that we still haven’t exhausted.

We spent a glorious week once in Bowdon, Georgia, just the two of us researching family history and even meeting a distant cousin. My great-grandparents left there right after the Civil War, so we retraced their wagon tracks and stopped by a courthouse in northern Louisiana, which led us to the remains of a cotton mill in Arizona, Louisiana that my great-grandparents had bought after the war yet failed to make a go of. The next year we even organized a family trek there, with three of my mother’s brothers and her two sisters.

Many years later, after I finally completed my novel, I began to do pre-publication readings. I’ve always thought of myself as a very shy, private person, so reading my work aloud terrified me, as it does many new authors. I asked one of my cousins, Mary Beth, a former speech teacher and professional public speaker, for help. She coached me. I needed a Web site, and Mary Beth’s sister, Jo, with a degree in computer science, became my Web mistress. Connie, my partner, has been beside me every step of the way.

I did a reading in Dallas this summer, and to my surprise, six of my new friends from Tyler attended, as did two of my old friends from Ft. Worth. Three of my old friends have asked me to speak to their book clubs after The Storm is published in December, and my BSB friends have been nothing but supportive. In January, I’ll visit Jewel, a lesbian book club in Dallas, to discuss my writing with my new and old friends there. Then I’ll be off to Palm Springs and Austin for other presentations this spring.

Connie has introduced me to Facebook, which has multiplied my circle of friends, and my editor Ruth is teaching me to Tweet on Twitter and fight online pirates who may try to steal my book. I’m even finding a few hours to fashion a new novel, based on some time I spent in Paris during the 1970s.

Writing the stories my mother has shared with me and the ones I’ve made up to complement hers has certainly influenced my future, but has it altered the past? Will the happy ending I’ve given my grandmother and my uncle somehow change the sadness in the life she and he both endured?

I like to think it will, just as writing a novel has changed my life and brought me closer to both family members and old/new friends, and to my more public self.

Editing an Editor

By Shelley Thrasher

As an experienced teacher and editor, I’ve spent years coaching others who are caught up in the creative process. However, as a new author, suddenly I feel like a college freshman again. Scary.

I do have help, though, and I love my editor!

She’s on my side, she wants me to do well, and she hates to tell me when my writing stinks—but she does it anyway. And after I suck my thumb for a while, I dig deeper and come up with something a lot better than what I originally wrote.

I don’t question or object to any of the major revisions she suggests. I have to admit that I love to research, which makes me attempt to include historical facts, characters, and events just because I think they’ll fascinate my readers as much as they intrigue me. Wrong. When my editor points out that they detract from my story, I reluctantly see her point and cut them, even though it hurts.

While growing up, I always hid my emotions, both from others and myself. So even now when my editor questions how my heroines feel, I do a double- take. I appreciate her encouraging me to explore the realm of emotions, though. I immediately dig in and try to empathize with my characters and express what’s going on inside them.

Or my editor will ask me to expand a scene, and I’ll gladly do it, again grateful for the opportunity and encouragement to explore a situation in more depth. Such major suggestions help make my story stronger.

Our most lengthy discussions usually concern small matters. For example, while writing my upcoming novel The Storm, I discovered that in England, Philip Morris targeted women as consumers for Marlboro cigarettes as early as 1847. Years later, the same company tried to interest American women in Marlboros, using the slogan Mild as May. It fascinated me that the Marlboro Man I grew up hearing about was once a woman who smoked “sissy” cigarettes.

However, my editor checked the facts and spotted one I’d overlooked. The American campaign didn’t take place until 1924, several years after the 1918-1919 setting of my novel. After I tried to determine what kind of cigarettes one of my main characters, Jacqueline (Jaq), would choose instead of Marlboros, we finally decided to simply say that she smoked cigarettes. We did specify, however, that her husband smoked Lucky Strikes, since they and Camels became very popular brands among soldiers during World War I.

That’s a small example of the kind of collaboration that occurs behind the scenes during our editing process, and it requires a lot of back-and-forth time. Although most readers wouldn’t give such details a second thought, you never know when someone may Google trivia about Marlboros or Camels, or even be an expert in the history of cigarettes.

My editor and I also talk about punctuation minutiae such as ellipses and commas quite a bit, but I won’t bore you with those discussions.

Suffice it to say that she’s the greatest.

FACTUAL FICTION

by Dale Chase

 

 

            Invention has long been the joy of my fiction writing and when I moved from contemporary erotica to historical, there remained delight in making it all up. Writing my erotic novel Wyatt: Doc Holliday’s Account of an Intimate Friendship took it a step further by incorporating actual people and events into a fictional account. This was a real eye opener and while it turned out to be the most exciting and rewarding experience of my writing career, it also presented situations never before encountered.

            I savor the first-draft process where invention is truly at work, but I hate plotting. I’d rather make up people and indulge in their personal exchanges than think up what happens next. The best part of switching to fact-based fiction, or factual fiction as I’ve come to call it, was not having to plot a thing. History had done it for me. When I needed to know what happened next, I just looked it up in the Wyatt Earp biography I used as my blueprint. This never failed to amuse me and I was most grateful the men had produced such a fine story for me to appropriate.

            On the other hand—and this is a big other—that biography had far more action than I could put into my book. Though I was able to illustrate the major events and fully portray the five-year relationship between Doc and Wyatt, I still had to condense the story, but at what price? Every time I cut or tweaked, there came a sense of guilt because I was fiddling with history. It seemed blasphemous in a way, especially with such well known men, but I pressed on. As I did the necessary shaping, however, I never lost the sense that I, the fiction writer, the inventor of stories, was an intruder.

            Writing a first person account in this factual fiction further complicated things as, with Doc Holliday narrating, I had to write him into scenes where he had not actually been present. The few times I did this, it was easy to do writing-wise, but history again came scratching at me for my tinkering. Of course the pure fiction part, the emotional and sexual relationship between Doc and Wyatt, was the most fun and in that I was free to invent all I wanted. But once they were done, it was back to those facts, checking the book for what happens next.

            In writing this factual fiction, I noticed something about the facts themselves: history has been set down by people who are interpreting events from their reading of actual accounts. Trouble is, there are never enough actual accounts and documents to fill all the gaps. And too often I read something in a biography where the author spoke quite definitively about an event, then at the end said it might not have happened that way at all. Thus there sometimes came the need to pick a version.

            Likewise, there is a factual fiction challenge in portraying real men. Wyatt Earp comes across as stern and fearless by most accounts, but Doc Holliday is all over the place, viewed as a soft spoken, smart, witty, short tempered man by many (including me), but viewed as near sociopath by others. Bat Masterson said awful things about Doc while Wyatt and most others were generous. So what was I to do? Being it is a fictional account, I wrote the Doc I felt and in that I believe I captured the true man. Nobody really knows, of course. All we have are “facts.”

 

 

 

Still Fighting For Freedom

BY KI THOMPSON

I was going to write a patriotic and historical blog about the 4^th of July. After all it was entirely appropriate. I had intended to talk about my recent trip to Fort McHenry where I watched an airshow that included the Blue Angels and the raising of the Star Spangled Banner – all in honor of the bicentennial of the War of 1812.

But upon reflection, the idea of a more traditional 4^th came to mind, conjuring up thoughts of barbecues, picnics, parades, and fireworks, all in celebration of our freedom as Americans.

However, it was then I came face-to-face with the realization that in fact not all Americans are free. In fact, the vast majority of LGBT Americans residing in most of the states and towns across this country continue to be denied the right to be who they are or marry the person they love – some of the most fundamental of human rights. And although eight states and DC have passed marriage equality laws (though Maryland and Washington face referendums in November), the federal government does not recognize same-sex marriages, nor do the other states with no such protections.

So I had the idea of celebrating this 4^th of July by saying thank you to your state LGBT equality organization. Thank them for the tireless (and thankless) work they do on our behalf every day to secure our most basic freedoms. Most of these organizations operate on shoestring budgets with less than 3-4 staff to cover the entire state. They receive nasty comments from right-wing fanatics and are more often than not criticized by their own communities for failing to achieve the impossible, usually with little help from these communities.

So today, when you celebrate Independence Day and how our founding fathers and mothers fought for our freedom, send your state LGBT organization an email thanking them for fighting for our freedom. It takes so little of your time and makes such a big difference to them. Better yet, how about making a donation – $4 in honor of the 4^th, or $17.76 in honor of the 236^th celebration – to help support the work they do? I know they’d appreciate the thanks or the donation.

If you don’t know who your state LGBT organization is, visit www.equalityfederation.org and click on the map of the state you live in.

Let’s never forget those who fought and died for our freedoms in the past, as well as those who continue to fight for us today. I hope everyone has a safe and happy 4^th.

A Conversation with Lambda Finalist Jess Faraday

 

Jess Faraday’s debut novel, The Affair of the Porcelain Dog, is a Lambda Literary Award finalist for gay mystery. Writer Jeffrey Ricker talked with her recently about her debut, her upcoming novel, and how historical fiction can be relevant to and address contemporary issues.

 

Jeffrey Ricker: Congratulations on being a Lambda award finalist! I loved The Affair of the Porcelain Dog. It was one of those books I couldn’t put down; I frequently overshot my lunch hour because I wanted to read one more page. How did the idea for that book come about?

Jess Faraday: Thanks! The book actually evolved from an exercise I did with my writing group. The exercise was to take a character from something we were working on and put that character in a completely different time and place. I took a sorcerer’s assistant from a swords-and-sorcery piece and put him in a Sherlock Holmes story. The more I worked on it, the more I realized that there was just so much more to be said.

JR: You’ve trained as a linguist and translator. Tell me a little about what that entailed. How would you say that’s influenced your writing, if at all?

JF: I’ve always been fascinated by language and words—not just nuances in meaning, but the rhythm, color, and music of it. I’ve always loved these things, and I try to incorporate them into my writing, hopefully without going overboard. I love translation because one has to really think about the shades of meaning of key words, and the greater picture created when all the words come together. It’s the same when writing a story: the rhythm, color, and music created by the language gives the story a certain feel that affects setting, plot, and character, but registers on a completely different level.

JR: What is the most challenging thing about writing?

JF: Getting through the first draft, which will always be completely crappy. Subsequent drafts are easy. Fun, even. Because it means turning garbage into something nice. But getting through that first draft can be a nightmare.

JR: What made you decide to write a novel from the point of view of a gay man in Victorian London? Did you ever have any concerns about creating an authentic voice for that character?

JF: I think every writer wants to create believable, sympathetic characters. I do, and I hope that if my characters lack authenticity as either gay men or as Victorians, that they’re at least believable as people.

I did a lot of sociological research about London in the late Victorian era—not just specifically about the lives of gay men, but about relationships between men and women, different races and social strata, and how these things fit together (and also lighting, personal hygiene, battlefield medicine, pollution of the Thames, and the history of envelope sealants).

The idea to make the main character the crime lord’s lover, rather than just his assistant, sparked when I came across the Labouchere Amendment, which aimed to protect women and girls from exploitation by criminalizing “indecency” between men (huh?)—not only actual sexual acts, but attempted acts, with no evidence required. It sounded so much like today’s hysterical “think of the children!” rhetoric that I had to include it somehow. Also, it made the resolution of the plot that much more pressing!

JR: Part of the writer’s function is to engage with and comment on contemporary culture. You wouldn’t think that historical fiction could do that, but Porcelain Dog was a very accessible novel, and seemed to resonate and not be so far removed from modern culture, while at the same time being grounded in Victoriana.

JF: We like to think that human societies are continuously evolving forward, becoming better, smarter, more enlightened, etc., with every passing generation. But it simply isn’t true. We keep dealing with the same conflicts over and over. Money. Sex. Power. Love. How we think about them may be different in different times and places, but the conflicts are always the same. They’re never solved forever, and they never go away. I think addressing the universal conflicts that have always been with humanity, and always will be, is what makes historical writing interesting and accessible to others.

JR: What are you working on now? How is it similar or different from Porcelain Dog? Do you think you’ll ever revisit the character of Ira Adler in a future book?

JF: Right now I’m finishing another mystery, this time set in early 19^th-century Paris. The protagonist is the last remaining female Sûreté agent after the resignation of Sûreté founder Eugène Vidocq. Unlike Porcelain Dog, this book has a significant supernatural element. I’d say it’s closer to speculative fiction than to pure historical fiction.

The next book on the docket is the sequel to Porcelain Dog. =)

Third Time’s a Charm

 by Rebecca S. Buck

 

The Locket and the Flintlock is almost here. Which is a wonderful feeling. I’m so excited. I am incredibly proud of this novel. Clearly, I liked my first two novels, Truths and Ghosts of Winter but there is just something about my third novel that makes it my favourite.

Perhaps I’m a better writer now than I was two years ago. I’ll leave that to the reader to judge. Certainly, practice makes perfect and the expert guidance of my wonderful editor, Ruth Sternglantz, has helped a lot. Instead of something to wrangle into shape, words have become a tool. A paintbrush with which to paint a world in whatever tones and hues I choose, to colour that world with emotion and life.

As a historical novel, it would be tempting, I suppose to paint this one in shades of sepia, or the yellow of an old manuscript. It is certainly lovely to see history in that sort of soft glow. But for me, it’s never been like that. I love The Locket and the Flintlock because even though I crafted a romantic tale of Regency England, it is vibrant. Not just because it is also an adventure story with action and danger, but because I can see the colours of the leaves on the trees, the mist of the characters’ breath in the night air, the glinting of the light on a stolen ruby necklace. Those details are so important to me when I write historical fiction. Not to make it more “accurate” but to make it more real. I want to remove the “otherness” of history. I want my readers to see it as I do. A colourful world, full of detail. Not faded and distant.

In The Locket and the Flintlock I am especially excited to invite my readers into my favourite period of history: The Regency. That period in British history where the King was declared insane and the fat, indulgent Prince Regent reigned in his stead. The time of Jane Austen and Romanticism. Also the time of the Napoleonic Wars, the Industrial Revolution, rapid urbanisation and enclosure, of failed harvests, revolutionary poets, protest, a bloody penal system, and general unease. It’s a period which has always fascinated me and, in this novel, I wanted to bring together some of the aspects of it that make it such a wonderful time to explore. There is a gentlewoman who, on first appearances, could have walked out of a Jane Austen novel. But her world soon collides with the darker side of the Regency. Many are starving and turning to crime, risking the hangman’s noose in order to make a living. Workers are so dissatisfied with their treatment that they turn to machine-breaking in organised gangs, apparently swearing allegiance to a mysterious General Ludd who hides out in Sherwood Forest. The rules of civilised society still dictate that women often marry for money or social advancement. I wanted to lead my characters through this world and see how it affects them, and their developing love story.

I was also keenly aware that the Regency was a very fleeting period. Times would soon change. The Victorian era, arguably England’s greatest and most in/famous age, obscures the Regency from view in many histories of the nineteenth century. These years were the last years before photography and the window into the past it allows. The last years in which workers still laboured in their homes rather than factories. The last time it was feared Britain might have another revolution in the manner of the French. It was the last era that highway robbers still prowled the streets, before turnpikes and formal, organised policing wiped them out. The sense of time passing and things changing is something I wanted to capture in my writing too. A moment in time preserved forever, before things changed inexorably.

It will be up to my readers to tell me if I captured the essence of this period successfully. I’ve not loaded the novel with historical detail. I want you to feel the Regency, not read about it. I am so incredibly passionate about this time period, and in The Locket and the Flintlock I feel as though I’ve painted a colourful picture of it. I hope I have. It’s why I’m so especially proud of this book.

That, and because the overriding theme is all about freedom and making choices. I think a book captures a particular moment in its writer’s life. At the moment I’m all about freedom. When my characters gallop on horseback through the woodland…I can feel the wind in my hair with them.

Time Travelling

by Rebecca S. Buck

When people find out that my upcoming novel, The Locket and the Flintlock is a work of historical fiction, they seem impressed and intrigued, which is lovely. It also puzzles me, since I find writing historical fiction easier than writing a contemporary story. I think it seems like a difficult feat to many people because historical fiction implies the knowledge of both how to write well and of a lot of rather dry historical detail. The historical writer’s task is apparently to breathe life and colour into what, to many people who remember studying history at school, a lot of dates and lists of events.

To be fair, I do know a lot of dry historical detail. I’m a history geek and increasingly proud of it. But that’s not my starting point for historical fiction. I don’t take a historical fact and write my story around it. I start with the people. Not all historical writers work like I do. My own personal favourite historical novel, Sharpe’s Waterloo by Bernard Cornwell, takes an hour by hour account of that famous Napoleonic battle in 1815 as its starting point and weaves the fictional characters into it.

But for me, it begins with the imagination, not the facts. A moment in time. A scene. One character.

I thought this blog would be a good place to explain how it this process works for me, since it’s one of the questions I’m most commonly asked. I felt the process at work very recently, and I’ll use my account of that to explain what I mean.

I went on a trip to the town of Newark on Trent in north Nottinghamshire. Of course, England is blessed with historic sites all over the place and this could have happened anywhere, and frequently does. But on this day it was Newark. Though only a market town it’s a special place. It was very significant during the English Civil War, and has a beautiful castle on the banks of the River Trent, now in wistful ruins.

While walking in these ruins, I happened to glance up at one of the old stone window frames, devoid of glass for a long while. And instantly I asked myself “who is standing there?” It’s a very specific question. I can conjure up, through historical knowledge, images of King John (who died there in 1216) or Cavalier soldiers in the 17^th century. But that’s not what I’m asking myself. What I’m asking is “who do I see there?” And, invariably, it’s not a well-known figure from history or a generic representative of an era, but a specific person from the decades in between. The years when life went on as normal and there were not battles or visits from kings. In this case I saw a woman, in a long dress.

I have to focus at this point. Who is she? A Norman, a Tudor, or later? A Victorian visitor to what was already, by then, a ruin? I try to connect with the sense of the place I’m in and see how she fits. Then I know: she belongs to a time when the castle was complete, a home as well as a garrison. Perhaps the sixteenth century. Before the Civil War, certainly. Her dress is not fine, but she’s no servant. Perhaps the wife, sister or daughter of one of the commanding soldiers based at the castle. She is pretty, with long, light brown hair. She rests slender hands on the window ledge as she looks out at the view. She seems to be thinking about something that makes her rather pensive.

What is she thinking about? Her future? Her past? Her family? A lover?

Hmm. A lover. And who is that lover? Why does thinking of them make her look so pensive?

These thoughts continue for a while. Slowly, the lady in the window acquires a back story. Sometimes even a name. In this case, I called her Melisende. She is pensive because her father, commander of the garrison, is to be stationed elsewhere and she does not want to leave Newark, because her lover is there. She smiles and flushes when she thinks of her lover, despite her sadness. She can barely believe she is so deeply in love.

And thus the story grows and begins to take on a life of its own. The characters start to dictate their own futures. From Melisende, I move on to her lover. I think of names, back stories, descriptions. Then I work out how these people relate to each other and how their story will unfold. That gives me a plot.

Only then does the historical period become important. What period suggested itself to me right away? Is the plot suitable for this time period? Do I need to adapt it at all because of social and cultural considerations of the setting? Sometimes the historical period suggests other characters, or deviations in the plot. But I never let the history dictate the story.

I aim to always be historically authentic. I say authentic rather than accurate, because sometimes some artistic license is necessary. But my story, language, characters and scene building have to have the “feel” of the period I’m writing about.

In my historical writing, my aim is to bring the unknown people of the past to life. It’s not to deliver a history lesson, nor is it to present a different interpretation of some famous historical figure or event. Those sorts of stories can be wonderful, but they’re not what I feel passionate about writing. I want to write the stories of those the history books miss. The story of a woman who once stood in a window of Newark Castle and admired the view, sighing a little as she did so. I can’t travel in time. I can’t see through the centuries to the real people no one noticed. But I can imagine what might have been. The people who could have been in the places I visit. I’m less interested in the ones who were documented as being there. I want to fill in the gaps. Because it’s in those spaces that people like us lived their lives.

So, my historical writing nearly always begins with a place. A moment. And one character who could have been there. From there, hopefully, it expands into a short story or novel. But it remains about the characters, not the history.

The Locket and the Flintlock began in a woodland clearing. I saw a highway robber, dashing, brave, and female. I heard her whisper the words “Stand and deliver,” but she was not robbing a carriage when she said them. She wore a dark cloak and a tricorn hat, even though she lived in 1812 when tricorns were going out of fashion. And from there, I created a novel.

The Birth of a Novel

by Shelley Thrasher

As a kid, I preferred to stay with my dad’s mother rather than my mother’s. After all, she had a big black Cadillac, loved to drive as far away as Shreveport to shop and eat out, and had plenty of free time to devote to me. I’d spend the night with her, and we’d lie in bed and read raunchy historical novels such as Forever Amber. Occasionally, she even told me a dirty joke.

My other grandmother didn’t drive. Instead, she stayed home and took care of her huge family, some of whom always needed a place to live until they “got on their feet.” Her outside activities consisted of playing the piano for the nearby Methodist Church and teaching a long line of students to play hymns. Boring!

When I decided I wanted to learn the piano, at least this grandmother didn’t make me play hymns. Instead, she introduced me to classical music and helped me master Tchaikovsky’s melodious “Waltz of the Flowers” and Chopin’s passionate etudes, which I adored. I also recall her mentioning the opera Aida for some reason, as well as the fact that her younger brother taught at SMU and wrote books of poetry. He was even the poet laureate of Texas once. Still, none of that made her seem very interesting.

The years passed, and I went to college, hitchhiked through Europe and the Middle East, and experienced some of the adventures I’d read and dreamed about.

After I finally settled down to teach English to college freshmen and sophomores, I attended a feminist writers’ workshop in Aurora, New York, and my attitude toward my grandmother began to change. (Having Judy Grahn there as our featured writer certainly didn’t hurt.)

I began to write poetry, discovered that my grandmother’s poet brother was gay, and started paying attention to the stories my mom and aunts had long been telling about my grandmother’s difficult early married days on the farm. They said her music had kept her sane. Then I discovered a letter she wrote to my granddad before they were married in 1912, and the closet door creaked open.

In this early poem about her, I quote from her letter to my granddad. He’d proposed and given her an engagement ring, and she wrote him to explain why she was returning it.

In 1912

My grandmother wrote,

“I can’t understand why I yield to you,

believe that I love you and say so, act so,

then doubt my own heart,

wonder at my actions when you are gone.”

He courted more ardently.

She yielded.

Fifteen years older, he plucked her

from her world of girls’ boarding school,

daily piano practice,

ice-cream socials, singing in a quartet,

university education.

He deposited her on a small farm in Texas

with onions to plant in her garden,

cornbread to cook on a wood stove,

five cows to milk each morning and night,

a black washpot to make lye soap in.

She bore him nine children,

which thickened her 18-inch waist;

bore with her mother-in-law who called “frivolous”

her thirty outing diapers,

her subscriptions to Ladies’ Home Journal and Etude—

declared “Pshaw” about her frequent washing

of babies and ammonia-smelling diapers in #3 washtubs—

who let her,

finally,

take care of the chickens

and the flowerbeds.

No wonder she doubted her own heart.

After I wrote that poem, I dug around in the family archives and uncovered some letters from my grandmother to her college roommate. I’d read about romantic friendship by then, in Lillian Faderman’s classic work, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present, so I didn’t immediately consider my grandmother gay. But something about the phrasing in her letters gave me pause and spoke to me in a language I understood.

My grandmother no longer seemed boring. I began to imagine what her life was like and what it could have been, and my novel The Storm was born.

Leni who? Oh, that one. Eeek!

by Justine Saracen

When I was asked at a talk last year about my work in progress and I replied, “a thriller / love story set around the world of Leni Riefenstahl,” I got two reactions. One, mostly from the under-forty audience, was a complete blank. Evidently, the younger generation does not dwell on the tumults of the 1940s. The other, from the older women with longer memories, was a squint of consternation. Then afterwards, I heard it in words.

“What?! Leni Riefenstahl? That Nazi bitch!”

Leni

Poor Leni. Brilliantly talented, she created the most powerful propaganda documentary of the 20^th century, but alas, it was for Adolf Hitler.

Oops.

For my novel Tyger Tyger, Burning Bright, set in Nazi Germany, I read Riefenstahl’s autobiography in her rather elegant German. I expected to find her despicable, but she was not. In fact, she was awesome. Narcissistic, too, but how could she not be. Slender and pretty, she started as a dancer, then in the 1920s discovered the infant film industry. In short order, she reinvented herself as an actress. She made mountain climbing movies before the era of the ‘stunt double’ and climbed her own icy cliffs and pinnacles and slid off her own icebergs. By her own report, she allowed herself to be covered by a small avalanche, merely for a good bit of film footage, and it nearly killed her. Audacity was equaled only by her vanity, and both drove her to success in the Berlin film community.

But what she is both remembered and condemned for is her work on the other side of the camera. With little directorial experience, but an instinct for the visually dramatic, she created two of what the cinematic world uniformly acknowledges as masterpieces.

In Triumph of the Will and later Olympiad she astonished the world with new photo angles, distance shots, mobile cameras, ingenious juxtapositions, and an overall compelling vision. She filmed marching troops as if choreographed in geometrical patterns, Hitler’s plane emerging from clouds and casting a shadow ‘blessing’ over the streets of Nuremburg, red party flags flowing like a river of blood onto a field, the Führer himself with sunlight radiating from his face and hands. In Olympiad, she presented fencers as dancing shadows, long distance runners filming their own feet, high divers swooping like dive bombers — all with manual-wind cameras and 1930s technology. Her talent and genius were recognized internationally, but her time of glory lasted only as long as Hitler’s did. After the war, her friendship with Hitler and her complete silence about the crimes of the Nazi state established her as heartless and ruined her professionally.

Can one iconize someone who is so morally compromised? The answer, I think, is yes-no-maybe. Before we condemn her, we must look at the moral compromises that our own current media – and its consumers — have made. If Riefenstahl was morally indifferent, so are millions of us, to the illegality of US drone missile assassinations, to two wars of aggression, to children starving in Africa, to the near enslavement of people who make our designer clothing and laptops, to waterboarding, to the suffering of the animals we eat.

I do condemn Riefenstahl, the ‘friend of Hitler.’ Most certainly. But I also admit to an extreme fascination with her. For starters, you have to admire the sheer stamina of the woman. Tainted by her association with fascism and unable to work in the industry after the war, she went all on her own – in her sixties – to live with and film the Nuba in Africa.

Leni

Then, at the age of seventy(!), she learned how to scuba dive and started a fourth career as an underwater photographer. With the help of a young male assistant, she was scuba diving into her 90s and was active artistically until her death at the age of 101 (after partying with Siegfried and Roy and their white tigers).

Rest assured, I would never make her the heroine of my novel. She was brilliant but she was not sexy. For all her creativity and genius, she was too tainted by association with an evil that had no glamor. Her appeal is that she makes an excellent foil for those who do resist, and resistance is very sexy.

A few resisted unequivocally; Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, students in the White Rose organization, partisans in the east, German anti-fascists, and the spies of foreign intelligence.  My novel, in fact, is dedicated to three such women spies who died horribly in concentration camps.

In contrast, my novel’s heroines (and its heroes) are not so morally pure. These are Katja Sommer, a “good German” who late in the game discovers honor in treason; Frederica Brandt, active in the highest circles of power; Rudi Lamm, homosexual camp survivor and forced SS killer; and Peter Arnhelm, a half- Jewish terrorist.

I trust my readers will be nuanced in their judgment of them and, for that matter, of Leni Riefenstahl too, for who of us, without benefit of hindsight, could resist such temptation. None of us are media stars, and none of us have been offered the chance to have instant fame by signing on with the Pentagon, so we don’t know.

As a fiction writing media mouse, I hope I will be forgiven for my fascination with Leni, and my envy of her talent. I know for sure I would not sell my soul to a malevolent political party (though millions of Americans apparently have). But I do want to wield a virtual pen the way she wielded a camera and create vivid and compelling works that will last in people’s memory. I want to have a third and fourth career when the first two peter out, and be able to afford a facelift when I am seventy. I want to be scuba diving at the age of ninety, and still look good in a wet suit. I want to party with lions and tigers.

Is that too much to ask?