It is my great pleasure to bring you my featured blog post from the Sapphic Book Club which has featured me as a writer. In this guest blog post, I talk about my experience of writing Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love and marriage published in August 2022 by Thorned Heart Press.
Today’s spotlight shines on Janet Mason, the author of Loving Artemis. Read on to learn about how Mason’s “lesbianized” personal experiences became the basis for this story!
Loving Artemis
In telling a friend about the creation of my book Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love and marriage published by Thorned Heart Press, I mentioned that I “’lesbianized’” my youth meaning that the characters were a lot more empowered. In doing so, I created a happy ending – or two. Three if you count the march of history.
I told this same friend that I might have given my characters happier endings than the ones they actually came to. This is true. I was in my last year of high school in 1977, when the rights we might have in the future were just hinted at on static ridden television screens. My main characters, Artemis and Grace, were also in their senior year of high school in 1977. Like Artemis and Grace, I grew up in a tract house working class landscape.
Like many fiction writers, I drew on the details of reality. In particular, the details of the tract house landscape where the novel is set are almost identical if not exactly the way I remember it. As the lesbian writer Willa Cather once said, “There are all those early memories. You cannot get another set.”
I grew up with girls like Artemis who were outlaws, got caught, and went to jail. I knew girls who grew up too fast and lived in trailer parks and had children with men who may or may not have stuck around. I don’t know that the women, like my character Artemis and the love of her life, Linda, ever got together and discovered that they could have lives together.
When I was coming of age, history was changing. When I was a child, the Vietnam War raged on the television nightly. The Civil Rights movements inspired the foment that led to the Women’s Liberation Movement. This led to early Gay Liberation and even though it was mostly cis-gendered white men at the beginning, it led to the LGBTQ movement. All of this leads to the events that ushered in marriage equality becoming the law of the land in the U.S. in 2015. And marriage equality is now under threat.
When Artemis heard about the outspoken anti-gay former beauty queen Anita Bryant and the national gay activist Harvey Milk on the news, it gave her hope that there were others like her out there—somewhere. It gave her hope for the future–which she needed because she was headed for hard times.
I am more like Grace, the other main character in Loving Artemis. Grace enters the picture a few months before Artemis goes to reform school and then prison. Like Grace, I fled from my working-class origins with the help of a college education.
The novel is framed with the women in mid-life attending the Pride rally in New York City and Grace seeing a woman in the Dykes on Bikes contingent who she thinks she was briefly lovers with in high school. Artemis rode a motorcycle in high school also.
I did a fair amount of research on motorcycles for the writing of Loving Artemis. I also did a fair amount of research on the saints (quite a few of them were lesbians or differently gendered) on Catholic.com. I enjoyed the writing of the novel and I had quite a good time in the chapter where Grace goes to a party, takes her first (and only) acid trip, meets Artemis (who she recognizes from school) and imagines that Artemis is Saint Anne, who is a bit butch.
I said that I “lesbianized” my youth because my experience of growing up in a tract-house working-class landscape was quite different. I didn’t feel that empowered, to say the least. I’ve often said that I was lucky to have gotten out of that place alive. After Loving Artemis was accepted for publication and had found a home with Thorned Heart Press, and it was time for me to go through the editing process, I dreaded it. I thought of it as having to “go back there.” What I found, in actuality, was that the editing from the publisher was light and at the same time, there were a few key points that took me and the writing to a deeper level. So, the editing process was a good one. When I finished, I had the thought that I must have been more empowered than I remembered.
Ultimately in writing Loving Artemis, the characters showed me their courage and now I am handing that courage to you.
Janet Mason is an award-winning creative writer, teacher, and occasional blogger for such places as The Huffington Post. Her book, Tea Leaves, a memoir of mothers and daughters, published by Bella Books in 2012, was chosen by the American Library Association for its 2013 Over the Rainbow List. Tea Leaves also received a Goldie Award. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (Adelaide Books – New York and Lisbon) was featured at the 2018 Frankfurt Book Fair. Adelaide Books also published her novel The Unicorn, The Mystery late in 2020. She lives and writes in Philadelphia. Her novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love and marriage was published by Thorned Heart Press in August, 2022.
To read the post on the Sapphic Book club, click here
For information on my most recently published novel Loving Artemis click here
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