Guest Blog by Sally Pham – National Equality March Oct 11, Washington D.C.

UCSB funded sixteen undergraduates to attend the National Equality March in Washington DC. The NEM was organized by Cleve Jones, a long time gay-rights activist who worked alongside Harvey Milk. The NEM took place on Sunday, October 11, which is also coincidentally National Coming Out Day.

This last weekend, I went to the National Equality March in Washington DC. We first arrived to LAX around 9pm and ran into our first celebrity of at check-in: Ron Jeremy. We later asked the security guard about the contents of his luggage. ”Surprisingly, a lot of harmonicas.” Hmm, didn’t expect that one.

On Friday we arrived in Washington DC and went sightseeing for the day. I visited the National Mall with its many Smithsonian museums. I particularly enjoyed touring the American History Museum with Julia Childe’s kitchen. Even though Paula Deen is my home girl, Julia came first in the cooking realm. In the evening, there was a “Shine” in front of the Capitol where a small group queers and allies gathered to share their “coming out” experiences. The groups also spoke about the issues of the queer homeless. Several leaders had actually camped out for the week, trying to find queer homeless persons to speak at the event. Queer homeless is an issue which not very many people discuss because it concerns individuals who are left stranded, after they have come out to their parents. The topic opened our eyes to how lucky so many of us are to have open-minded families and friends as supportive outlets.

Early Saturday morning, Gallaudet college, a school for the hard of hearing, hosted a mini-conference for the queer and ally youth. At the conference, there were a series of workshops. One in particular was the Trevor Project. The Trevor Project talked about the different experiences young queers encounter during their childhood and coming out periods. Their main concern was focused toward queers who turned to suicide when supportive outlets were absent. As a response to the presentation, the delegation is currently working on bringing the project to UCSB’s campus. After the conference, we all headed to Union Station to perform a “Flash Mob.” We were instructed to act normal, like we were regular people in a train station. However, when we heard a specific sound, we had to freeze for a total of 3 minutes, demonstrating a pose according to the theme: This is What Equality Looks Like. For all the lost people of the train station, a banner was let down from a second story cafe with the theme written across. The 100ish of us then proceeded to a mini-march towards the Capitol. As we were walking, a number of tourists joined the crowd and marched alongside us. Unfortunately, we were kindly asked to disperse  the area after reaching the Capitol, otherwise we would have been arrested for disrupting the premises.

Sunday, the BIG DAY!!! The National Equality March is actually happening! Excited and pumped, we boarded the metro and headed for 800 Vermont Ave NW. UCSB’s sixteen undergrads along with thousands of other queers marched around the White House. In front, the youth led the way with a huge banner that read “Equality Across America” in blue and white. Cleve Jones and Lt. Dan Choi were also present and marched in front as well. Along the way, we chanted various phrases such as “Hey hey, ho ho, homophobia/transphobia gots to go!”, “What do we want? EQUAL RIGHTS! When do we want it? NOW!” and   ”Get Up! Get Down! There’s a Civil Movement in this Town!” Occasionally I stepped out of the crowd to take some photos and was swarmed with the great amount of rainbow flags, and diversity of queers. I witnessed a plethora Drag Queens, super-buff bears, butch lezzies, lipstick lezzies, transgendered persons, etc.

I know this sounds a bit corny, but when you’re surrounded by a massive group of people, fighting for the same human rights, a wave of uncontrollable emotions takes over your persona. The most touching was the visibility of the older generations. A large number of long-time couples were upset and disappointed for how long they’ve waited, and are still waiting, for their commitment and love for one another to be recognized. Many of them had even been marching since the 70s and were proud to see the progress and support of their struggle.

The march ended in front of the nations Capital, following a Men’s Choir singing inspiring acapella songs. They were all fabulously dressed in tourquoise and purple “Legalize Gay” shirts. Soon after, Lady Gaga gave a short speech, along with other speakers.

The National Equality March was unbelieveable! Honestly, I had doubts on how many queers and allies were going to gather in DC. Thankfully, my low expectations were quickly challenged with over 250,000 marchers. Overall, I’m proud to be part of this  movement and I’m so excited to see my generation as the leaders for queer and transgendered rights. Hopefully soon, we will have justice and equality for the  committed couples and equally deserved, persons alike.

I love this rendition of Jimmy in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

After the Flood, Margaret Atwood, Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

November 6, 2009

Just finished Margaret Atwood’s new book After the Flood, which my husband gave me as a post marathon triumph gift, a signed copy no less.  It’s a good book in the line of dystopian novels.  I’m also wild about Oryx and Crake which I adored and I loved the references to that novel in Flood which made me feel like part of the Atwood family.  I have read all of Atwood’s work and formed part of my dissertation around her poetry, so I think that she is deserving of a Nobel Prize considering her body of work.  She clearly is fascinated with the direction of science and gene splicing. 

Read this book and then read Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks on what actually happens when a big company harvests a poor black woman’s cells and sells them or cancer research.  You can guess.  The company makes millions.  The poor black woman dies and her family doesn’t make a cent.  But it’s much more fascinating than that.  It’s Atwood’s dystopia coming true.  Atwood stretches both intellect and imagination and shows us not the world as we want it to be, but the world we are making.

In the story, the baby swans dreamed of beauty….

Jamaica Kincaid

Amy Lee of Evanescence, Jamaica Kincaid, B.H. Fairchild, writing

November 6, 2009

“Wake me up inside, wake me up inside, call my name and save me from the dark,” Amy Lee of Evanescence sings on my IPOD.  Yesterday I was back running.  I’m training for another marathon.  A girl’s got to do something.  This was the one song I sang to when I was running the last marathon.  Note to self, people will look at you strangely when you sing along while running a marathon.  Or maybe I’m just not a very good singer. 

 But I like this song.  It’s everything I think about writing.  Writing is about waking up inside.  It’s about wrenching something dark from the inner tube of your own longing.  Monday night at dinner I sat beside Pete Fairchild, a poet who knows about earth and longing and fire.  I remember hearing him read for us at the Ruskin years ago and our staff afterward couldn’t stop themselves reading his poems out loud to each other.  The poems about driving cars and the prairie and the sun getting low.  They were dizzy with too many pitchers of beer and they kept reading Fairchild trying to climb inside the way he’d read the poem which was so low and gravelly you almost felt the dirt in your throat and felt your mother coming after you to get her car back.  Fairchild is a poet who writes of steel and hard work, of roads and of the inside of things that are huge.  When I think of his poetry I think of ironworks and the Hoover Dam even though all that isn’t in the poems, it comes to me anyway, the machinery of the earth.  I am away from skyscrapers, and closer to steel mills and people like me who can’t pay their bills and I like these people and I know that they will share their beer with me and maybe fries. 

 Jamaica Kincaid was there at dinner too, very clear eyed and lovely.  I saw her at the brunch and then again at dinner until I felt dizzy with seeing her.  We have all read her work, “Girl” and Annie John and I have read everything she’s written and loved the girl with marbles, the red girl, the mother, the island, the braids, I have wished to be that girl.  I have been the bad girl.  I have wished to have that mother if only so she could turn away from me.  I have pictured that father.  Kincaid gave us an island life in the most clear startling prose until we had eaten those corn fritters, had sung benna, if you were a bad girl and I was, I would grow to be the woman who the baker wouldn’t let near the bread.  Jamaica is so beautiful, just watching her alert in the light, I could see her storytelling face and I felt happy.  I remembered how many times I had read her stories after I left the cult and knew that I too was an outsider.  Not wearing the proper shoes.  Not a proper hat for a girl, they would say to me over and over.  And that would make me smile.  Make me glad in the heat.  For all things not proper are mine.

When I emerge from shadows… it will be as…

Where do story ideas come from? Dark places.

November 4, 2009

Where do your ideas come from?  That’s a question that new writers ask in creative writing classes, and it’s a good one.  Of course, you don’t have to have a thrashed childhood or a lunatic family to be a good writer, but it really helps!  Did being abandoned at three and raised in a cult that believed in waterboarding for children, help me become a writer?  You bet. 

 Did all those beatings come back to me as I beat my little fingers against the keys?  Of course, darlings.  And it has not gotten more normal from there because one of the things about a substantially abby-normal childhood is that it prepares you for abby-normal adulthood.  Of my two stepkids and two kids, we have one lesbian, two musicians, and it is anything but normal.  It’s crazy.  But crazy wonderful.  I had a dream last night in which we were all at the Hollywood Bowl.  My daughter and her girlfriend, my stepson who moved to Portland was there, and my son and my oldest stepson was there with his fiancé but in the dream they were married and had two children, one a four year old boy and the other a six week old daughter.  Here is the strange part of the dream, we were at a Rolling Stones concert, though to the best of my knowledge, no one in our family is a Stones fan.  In the dream, I asked Kelly, my son’s fiancé (wife in the dream) why she had brought the baby, and the baby was smiling the same beautiful smile as her mother and Kelly said, “I know she’s going to be a Stones fan.”  Now there’s surely a poem or story in there somewhere. 

 I’d rather think that stories emerge from dreams about the Rolling Stones at the Hollywood Bowl, about future marriage and babies than past abandonment and fear, but stories are all that, the best stories have to travel through the dark to get to the light.  Here’s a story.  At the university where I teach I was sexually harassed by a professor who was my superior, I was teaching in two departments at the time.  As a result of my complaint about this, I was not allowed to teach in the department where he taught and had to only teach in English.  I avoided that building for two years but finally one day, I went in to buy myself a Bit o Honey at the store.  I was careful not to be seen from his office, but his secretary strolled in when she saw me and said she’d missed me.  I asked how he was.  She seemed surprised I hadn’t heard.  He’d died eighteen months earlier.  Sometimes you avoid your old demons and fears long after they can’t even get you.  I eat Bit o Honey whenever I want to now.  Sometimes I have it for breakfast.  It’s sweet, it reminds me that I’m like a child of God, if there were a god, but I am a child of the universe and in its very cradle telling stories, like this one to you now.

New Literary Press and Magazine Directory! It’s Here

November 3, 2009

Red Hen Press publishes the new CLMP Directory!  It’s here!  Order Now, Start sending your work out immediately.  Foreword by Chris Abani.  Interview with yours truly below.

http://www.amazon.com/CLMP-Literary-Press-Magazine-Directory/dp/1597091529/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1257286458&sr=1-2

Kate Gale

Managing Editor and Co-Founder, Red Hen Press

 How did you arrive at your current position?

I arrived at the position of managing editor by being the founding editor of the press.

 What is the staff structure at your press/magazine?

We have a publisher, founder Mark E. Cull; an operations manager/marketing manager, a production assistant, a publicity assistant, and a development associate.

 What challenges do you face as a publisher?

The biggest challenges are as follows: 

1.  
   1. Reinventing publicity/marketing in this brave new world of new media.
   2. Living in a city with very low arts/capita giving, but very high cost of living.
   3. Working to create new development models in a shifting economy.

 Do you have any cover letter advice?

A cover letter should have three parts: 

a.  The part about You, and what you have done and where you

have been published. This also includes who recommended you.  Should be someone the editor knows.

1. The part about It and what It is that you are sending.
2. The most important part . . . the part about Them and how cool they are and how you fit into their world.

 What do you look for in a submission?

Great writing first, then marketability, then an author who plans to hustle.

 How are submissions processed at your press?

They are gone through first by an intern and sorted. The ones that look promising and have good cover letters go into the managing editor’s file. The others get rejected.

 Do you have a favorite unsolicited submission discovery or anecdote?

I got in this manuscript called Lift by Rebecca O’Connor. It’s a memoir about a woman falconer. My big falcon experience was that I think I saw one once at the Renaissance Fair. So it wasn’t the birding or the call of the wild. The writing was compelling; the loneliness and imaginative landscape felt like an architectural shape-shifting space. I wanted that book. Then I met Rebecca, who’s a joy, and knew it was going to be great. The book is shaping up to be released shortly.

 What advice do you have for first-time submitters?

If possible, when submitting for the first time, get someone the press knows to recommend the editor look at your work. It’s a short cut, but the slush pile is large and the editor’s time precious. It means to me that the writer did their homework and out of respect to my writer, I go ahead and take a look.

 What are your long-term plans for your press?

My long-term plans are to reach critical mass by having enough important publications for Red Hen Press to be a significant marketing presence. And I want to have reached a level of mastery with everything we do: editing, publicity, marketing, design, and production.

 What’s your evaluation of the current literary landscape?

Exciting, fluid, dynamic. We’re on the brink of shaping literature in new ways.

Lisa See, Clara Sturak, Ally Acker and friends