Articles in Books & literature
No Name-Calling Week, Prof. Smoke on Matthew Shepard, & the Women’s Summit
Gay AK – notes for and from LGBT Alaska
No Sticks, No Stones, No Dissing
GLSEN’s No Name-Calling Week is January 25-29, 2010, a week of educational and art activities aimed at stopping name-calling and bullying in schools. The Creative Expression Contest is an opportunity for students to submit essays, poetry, music, original artwork, or other pieces that convey their experiences and feelings about name-calling, and their ideas for putting a stop to verbal bullying in their schools and communities. Lesson plans and other resources at No Name-Calling Week.
Gale Smoke on Matthew Shepard
Professor Gale Smoke will review Judy Shepard’s book “The Meaning of Matthew, and a World Transformed” (Hudson Press, 2009) at this month’s Anchorage PFLAG meeting. Refreshments will be available and all are invited to the meeting at Immanuel Presbyterian Church on Jan. 21 at 7 p.m. Anchorage PFLAG.
Alaskans Together announces new board and officers
Congratulations to the new board members: Heather Bayless, Kelli Burkinshaw, Shayle Hutchison, Miguel De Marzo, Verner Wilson, and Christopher Narvaez. For 2010, the new executive officers for the organization are as follows: Elias Rojas – Board President, Joseph Lapp II – Vice President, Kevin Kristof – Treasurer, and Miguel De Marzo – Secretary. We are happy to announce that ATE is now a member of the Equality Federation. Come and join in the fun and hard work by volunteering to serve on one of the committees, which meet monthly by conference call. There is room for you! Join Alaskans Together.
Women’s Summit: Anchorage lunch 3/17 and Juneau conference 3/18 – 3/19
It’s time to sign up for the 2010 Women’s Summit on March 17-19. The theme for this year is “Interpersonal Violence in Alaska: Why Alaska Ranks at the Top, and Strategies for Success.” The keynote speaker is Rebecca Levenson, Senior Policy Analyst with the Family Violence Prevention Fund. Come listen, learn and network with other women from around the state. Rebecca will also speak at a luncheon in Anchorage on Wednesday, March 17, 12 pm at the Sheraton Hotel downtown, $35/person. A limited number of scholarships are available for the Juneau conference (for travel, lodging and registration) and are due by March 1. For those arranging your own travel and lodging, applications are due by March 10. The Women’s Summit is organized by the Alliance for Reproductive Justice.
Tantric Wisdom for the Activities of Daily Living
Bird Trungma, Rinpoche, has moved her short essays on Tantric Wisdom to HubPages. She hopes you will keep reading them, and continue to enjoy and benefit from them. Her first essay tells her story of moving to Anchorage, almost leaving, then deciding to stay. Check out Bird’s Tantric Wisdom.
Anchorage paper hosts legacy book for Mary Daly, Boston lesbian author
Mary Daly, radical lesbian feminist author of Gyn/Ecology and Beyond God the Father, passed away on Jan. 3, and the Anchorage Daily News opened a legacy book for the Boston professor who didn’t live in Alaska and probably never visited.
The ADN reprinted her obituary from the Associated Press, and the guest book currently has 105 entries, mostly from New England. Only 2 entries are from Alaska, although a few entries do not give locations.
Daly was a major voice in the women’s movement and a central figure in eco-feminism. Several of her books are among the classics of women’s studies courses. Her first book, The Church and the Second Sex published in 1968, argued that the Church systematically oppressed women for centuries. In later years, she considered herself “post-Christian.”
“Ever since childhood, I have been honing my skills for living the life of a Radical Feminist Pirate and cultivating the Courage to Sin,” she wrote in the opening of “Sin Big,” a 1996 autobiographical article for the New Yorker magazine. “The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-,’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a woman trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin.’ ”
Daly made headlines when she retired from Boston College (a Jesuit university where she taught for 30 years) rather than admit men to some of her advanced women’s studies classes, saying that the presence of men made the women less likely to speak. She did let men enroll in her introductory feminism courses and tutored them in the advanced subjects. Her anti-trans opinions were as controversial in the LGBT community as her anti-patriarchy stance was at Boston College.
Free copies of "Silent Lives" for GLBT-welcoming ministries
PFLAG Juneau has received another grant to give away several hundred more copies of the book by local author Sara Boesser, Silent Lives: How High a Price?
Silent Lives combines autobiographical stories, personal interviews and questions for reflection to explore issues about everyone’s sexual orientation and gender status, whether heterosexual, or gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or intersexual.
Boesser examines the consequences a sexual minority person suffers when attempting to pass as heterosexual or as having a traditional gender expression. She also looks at how society as a whole is affected when an individual is pressured to hide his or her sexual identity.
This year, the gift copies are available for furthering the work of “Welcoming Ministries” around the country: for faith and religious people, groups and denominations that are working to become more accepting of GLBT people, for your own work to make your faith community more accepting of GLBT people, or to give to someone you know who is involved in that effort, maybe a copy for a church or synagogue library, a counselor’s office, a religious parent, or a faith leader, rabbi, minister, preacher, pastor, or priest.
The book isn’t religious per se, but Boesser is a minister’s daughter and she reflects on that in the book. Excerpts of Silent Lives are posted on the Silent Lives web site.
“This book is the result of my personal struggle for integrity,” Sara wrote in the introduction to Silent Lives. “I realized I could no longer be silent and let society condemn a core part of me while praising the outer manifestations I selectively permitted it to see. And with that realization came another: while society was blind, my very silence was what blocked its vision.”
“From that instant of realization, my only hope for personal peace was to seek clues that could free me from my silence and to speak out about what I discovered in the process. This book is the result of the first fourteen years of that search.”
Kathy Reim of the Skagit PFLAG chapter wrote a column based on Silent Lives:
“Where is the silence in my life or yours? What do we lose when, as Sara Boesser challenges us, we “pass”- we pretend for whatever reason to be something else to make it comfortable for others and easier for ourselves – and lose our authenticity in the process?”
“… Boesser suggests we all lose when silence separates us. We end up hiding from ourselves. When the safety net is widened for all of us, the lives of everyone will be enriched.”
If you’d like a free copy or two, write to Sara Boesser with your name and mailing address, and say how many copies you’d like. And feel free to forward this message to others who might be interested.
You can read more about the welcoming Christian movement at Welcoming Community Network, and the welcoming multi-faith movement at Welcoming Resources.
KK editor, former ADN writer seeks Queer Alaska stories
Remember the local lesbian newsletter, Klondyke Kontact? Kim Wyatt, an editor of the KK and board member of RAW, has co-founded Bona Fide Books and wants to publish your stories of being gay or lesbian in the Great Land.
Queer in the Last Frontier is an anthology of literary essays that explore the experiences of LGBT Alaskans, the challenges and pleasures of being queer – for both newcomers and old-timers – in a place that is “isolated, conservative, and impossibly beautiful.” Bona Fide is also seeking essays for an anthology called Permanent Vacation: Living and Working in Our National Parks. The two calls for submission were posted earlier this month HERE.
Kim gave Bent Alaska the scoop on Queer in the Last Frontier:
Q. Why did you choose an anthology of literary essays on Queer Alaska?
A. I’ve always loved nonfiction anthologies, and received an MFA in nonfiction from UAA. Also, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and living in Alaska was an eye-opener. I felt like I had a better understanding of queer life and the importance of community after my time here. (Plus, I really love the title!)
Q. What queer and writing activities were you involved in when you lived in Alaska?
A. I edited the Klondyke Kontact for a while, and one of my goals was to make it a newsmagazine. I did shepherd it from rainbow-hued Xeroxed paper to newsprint with art, and tried to bring some consistency to the columns and layout. I applied for grants from the Gill Foundation and other organizations to upgrade materials. I had a lot of fun working on the KK, and had the help of some great Alaskan women. I was also on the board of Radical Arts for Women. And as I mentioned above, I got an MFA at UAA, and wrote for the Anchorage Daily News.
Q. What qualities are you looking for in the essays?
A. Honesty and transcendence are ideal, but I’m probably partial to stories that make me laugh or cry. We’re really just looking for well-written explorations of queer life in Alaska. Or life in Alaska as it is experienced by someone who happens to be queer. You can write about relationships, the Northern Lights, or working on a fishing boat. Just tell your story.
Q. Will you be visiting Alaska to promote the book?
A. Absolutely. I try to get up there whenever I can.
Kim has a special greeting for all the Alaskans who remember her, especially the KK readers:
“Hello, Alaskans! I just got back from a backpacking trip with another former Alaskan, Val Garrison – the friendships I made there are lasting, because that’s just the kind of people Alaskans are. (And I would like to give a shout-out to the Wesleyan Wimmin’s Writing Wetreat!)”
photo: Bona Fide Books Publisher Kim Wyatt & Val Garrison goofing around in Yosemite 9/09.
The deadline for submitting an essay to Queer in the Last Frontier is February 5, 2010 and the word count is limited to 5,000. Writers will receive $100 for their story and one copy of the collection. Send to Bona Fide Books submissions with “Alaska” and the title of the work in the subject line.
For more information, please visit Bona Fide Books.
New Press seeks Essays on Queer Alaska
Ex-Alaskan Kim Wyatt and Shelley Zentner from the UK launched Bona Fide Books earlier this year, “a small press that seeks to publish provocative and adventurous literature.” They are seeking submissions for two anthologies of literary essays: Queer in the Last Frontier and Permanent Vacation: Living and Working in Our National Parks.
Queer in the Last Frontier explores the experience of LGBT Alaskans, the challenges and pleasures of being queer in a place that is “isolated, conservative, and impossibly beautiful” for both chechakos and sourdoughs. Permanent Vacation considers the daily life and wider implications of living and working in our national parks, from Denali to the Everglades.
Queer in the Last Frontier
Alaska is a place of extremes, where people go to reinvent themselves. Or perhaps you were born there at a time when it wasn’t safe to be out. What is it like to grow up or remake yourself in a place that is isolated, conservative, and impossibly beautiful? Bona Fide Books seeks literary essays for Queer in the Last Frontier, the first collection to explore the challenges and pleasures of being gay or lesbian in the Great Land. We seek a diversity of experience, from the newly arrived to the old-timer who has seen it all. Send us your stories of prejudice, triumph, and community in the Last Frontier.
Writers will receive $100 for their story and one copy of the collection. Deadline: February 5, 2010. Manuscripts should be typed, double-spaced, and 12 point Times New Roman or Courier font with standard formatting applied; word count is limited to 5,000. Send to Bona Fide Books submissions with “Alaska” and the title of work in the subject line.
Permanent Vacation: Living and Working in Our National Parks
Bona Fide Books is also seeking literary essays about your experience working in our national parks, from Denali to the Everglades, Yellowstone to Yosemite. Some go seeking commune with nature; others to escape. Diverse park experiences are desired. Although we enjoy tree-hugging epiphanies, we also want to read about day-to-day life, and societal, environmental, and existential implications of living in the park. What happened there, and how did it influence your life?
Writers will receive $100 for their story and one copy of the collection. Submit manuscripts postmarked no later than January 5th, 2010 to Bona Fide Books submissions with “Permanent Vacation” and the title of work in the subject line. Manuscripts should be typed, double-spaced, and 12 point Times New Roman or Courier font with standard formatting applied; word count is limited to 5,000.
For more information, please visit Bona Fide Books.
