In honor of LGBTQ history month, I wanted to do a blog post — although in my book LGBTQ history is every month. As the saying goes, “Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.”
I decided to bring you an Amazon review of my book Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love and marriage (from Thorned Heart Press)
to honor our shared history — that some of you, like me, may have lived through.
5.0 out of 5 starsWow!
Reviewed in the United States on January 20, 2023
Endearing, indeed! This captivating story guided me on a historical memory lane of my lifetime. Being just a bit older than Art and Grace would be, this was a nostalgic journey for me. Beyond that, I loved the way Janet Mason wove the MCs lives through the contemporary events of their lives. Putting them in context with that history was extremely meaningful for me, helping me to reflect back on my own path to today. Low-key and powerful in its own special way.
For more information on my most recent novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love, and marriage, click here:
One of the really wonderful about my vegan journey is my connection to the animals–cows in particular. I always loved cows but didn’t become a vegan until after a bad medical experience four years ago. Before then I used to take walks in the countryside and communicate with the cows, telling them that I refused to eat them. But I still ate dairy which is often referred to as “scary dairy” in the vegan world.
In addition to being linked to numerous health problems, the consumption of dairy is a deep source of suffering for the dairy cows. After the farmers (increasingly industrialized) are done impregnating them and taking their milk (which is intended to go to their babies, not humans), the dairy cows are slaughtered for the cheapest cuts of meat. This is where hamburgers come from.
Humans are the only species that drink milk from another species, and it is very unhealthy.
From a Buddhist perspective, it makes sense that what is bad for the cows is bad for the humans. But I don’t think you have to be a Buddhist to understand that. I recently visited The Cow Sanctuary which my partner and I have developed a connection to through the cows we have helped to free. The Cow Sanctuary is one of the places where I have experienced the most freedom.
In thinking about being vegan, there’s a lot I could write about: improved health; compassion for the animals and the earth. But there is something I left out. Being vegan is fun! And it builds community.
I was reminded of this recently when we went to Flatbelly Veg restaurant just outside of Philadelphia. When we first arrived, my partner Barbara realized that she knew the couple who run the restaurant from her days of working at the U.S. Post Office in the Mt. Airy of Philadelphia.
We also had seen their food truck around the neighborhood, especially enroute to our Unitarian church in the East Mt. Airy section in Philadelphia. We occasionally have vegan potlucks at the church, an outgrowth of a vegan support group that we have online. When I mentioned to the owners of the restaurant that we had gone to a farm animal sanctuary she smiled. How nice to talk to someone who knew what I was talking about! One day as we sat outside enjoying our yummy vegan meal (fun!) another customer said “goodbye ladies” to us.
It’s great to be part of this vegan community that spans the world. I thought I’d bring you a few of the photos that we took at Flatbelly Veg:
For more information on my most recent novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love, and marriage, click here:
It’s hard to say goodbye to a friend and mentor. I said a few words at the memorial service of Anita Cornwell, the pioneering writer who wrote Black Lesbian in White America and thought I would repost them here. I also included some photos from the service and a link to my article about Anita that was originally published by the journal Sinister Wisdom and reposted after her death.
When I first thought back to knowing Anita, I thought well she was always there because I don’t remember a time of not knowing her.
But then I remembered the time when I met her – I was in my mid-twenties and a new lesbian and Anita was reading with Becky Birtha at the old gay and lesbian center on Camac Street. I was wearing purple neon socks and Anita commented that she liked my socks when we were chatting after the reading.
I remember reviewing her book, Black Lesbian in White America, and recommending it to people. As I recall my ahead of her time, feminist mother loved Anita’s unique and authentic voice.
I was later part of a writing group that Anita was in, but she left after a short while because the group didn’t fit into her schedule of writing all night and sleeping during the day.
But Anita was still part of my life. At a writing conference, she commented to me that agents change often so it’s important to keep sending things out. She also remarked that the state of publishing was depressing. Perhaps most of all, she modeled persistence to me, to keep on going on even when things are difficult. I remember my late writer friend Toni Brown and I going to visit Anita shortly before she got sick and had to move to Stapley which our mutual friend Sharon Hurley smartly arranged for her.
In one of our last visits, my partner Barbara and I found Anita laying down in her bed at Stapley. My helpful partner asked Anita if she could get her anything. “You can get me a million bucks,” said the still-sly Anita. Curious, Barbara asked her what she would do with the money. “First of all,” said Anita, “I would buy a car.”
Anita was laying down because she had forgotten how to walk.
It’s hard to say goodbye to a friend but that is what I am doing now.
I’m delighted that Thimble Literary Magazine published my memoir excerpt “Dancing The Polka.” This is a piece for my memoir that I am currently shopping around, titled LOST: a daughter navigates father loss and discovers what it means to belong.
Dancing The Polka
BY JANET MASON
“It’s beautiful out here! Watch the ground—it’s bumpy,” I cautioned as I walked over the lawn—which I suddenly realized was a hazard—with my hand in the warm, pliant crook of my ninety-seven-year-old father’s arm as I steered him into the day. It was late summer in the year before he died. Usually, my father sat quietly in his trash-picked chair in Jean’s living room which was decorated in a way my father described as “artistic.” Years after my mother had died, my father met his lady friend Jean.
We came to Jean’s house that afternoon, like most afternoons, after we ate breakfast at the Diner. Jean’s house sat on a large lot where she had planted ivy on the front lawn. Also in her nineties, a few years younger than my father, Jean loved to garden. Since it was a corner lot, there were only neighbors on two sides, and they divided her yard from theirs with chain-link fences. She had planted flowers on both sides next to her side of the fences. Magenta chrysanthemums were about to burst into bloom. In the back left of the yard, behind the clumps of flowers lining the fence, she also had a well-tended vegetable garden behind a homemade wire fence (“to keep the bunny out”). My father usually sat in the living room, but he came out to the garden with me this one time.
We were in Levittown, the land of working-class suburban conformity where I came from. I, along with my partner Barbara, was on one of my weekly visits to see my father. My father still lived in the same house where I grew up, around the corner from Jean. I grew up feeling different—and I was—and it wasn’t a place that was easy on people who were different, so I got out as soon as I could. When I was there, I felt like I never belonged. But I never would have questioned my place in the world when I was with my father.
My father died when he was ninety-eight, so he was elderly for a long time. When I was with my father, his well-being was my only concern. I didn’t think of it then but looking back I see I belonged then. I belonged to my father. I see now, in my single-minded focus on him, I also belonged to myself also.
I first started holding his arm, years after my mother died, when he was about seventy-five years old. He was resistant at first, insisting he could do everything by himself, without any help.
‘You’re pushing me. You’re pushing me,” he said loudly once when I was holding his arm on a ramp in a crowded community theater. He was in his late eighties at the time. Since I was larger than him, I was concerned people would think I was committing elder abuse. Over the years though, I kept holding my father’s arm and helping him. Eventually, he began tolerating my help. In his nineties, he would hold his elbow out so I could take his arm.
When Jean came along, I welcomed her presence. Many daughters might have been threatened when a potential love interest showed up for their widowed father. But I loved my father and wanted him to be happy. In the beginning, my father was happy. Later, they began to argue-Jean was very critical—and my father pointedly told me they were “just friends.”
Jean was very different from my mother. For starters, she was tiny. My mother, who died more than two decades before my father did, was the same height as my father. Both of my parents were almost six feet tall, a few inches shorter than the height I grew into. My mother was broad-minded and intellectual. Jean was conventional but inquisitive.
My partner, Barbara, usually came along on our visits. She had a close bond with Jean because she reminded Barbara of her late mother. Like Barbara’s late mother, Carmella, Jean loved to garden. Like Carmella, Jean also loved to get gussied up and go out. Jean, who was Polish American, also loved the polka, something Barbara’s mother didn’t relate to. Jean recognized a kindred spirit in Barbara, though.
“You’re Polish, aren’t you?” Jean kept asking Barbara even though Barbara had told Jean repeatedly that her mother was Italian American. This may have been early dementia. Jean developed dementia and died in a nursing home a few years after my father passed.
We couldn’t go to the home to see her because this was in 2020 during the pandemic when things were in lockdown. But Barbara commented that Jean might have dementia but “she would probably still remember the polka.”
Since Barbara is a musician, she recognized how important dancing to the polka was to Jean. Jean remembered dancing at the Polish festivals in her youth and was disappointed my father couldn’t dance with her. He was blind in one eye and had glaucoma in the other. Since he couldn’t see that well, dancing with her could have been dangerous. He might have fallen over and broken something. But Jean didn’t think about that. She just kept saying how disappointed she was.
That’s how Barbara ended up dancing the polka with Jean in the afternoons. As a drummer, Barbara also had experience dancing since her stern drum teacher had required her students to take African dance classes. Although, she still was taller, Barbara was closer in height to diminutive Jean. They both had long flowing white hair and were both enjoying themselves—especially Jean!—as they went round and round until the afternoons spun away.
Janet Mason’s book, Tea Leaves, a memoir of mothers and daughters waspublished by Bella Books in 2012. Her novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders was published by Adelaide Books (New York and Lisbon), also the publisher of her novel The Unicorn, The Mystery late in 2020. Her novel Loving Artemis. an endearing tale of revolution, love and marriage was published by Thorned Heart Press in August of 2022. Her work has been widely anthologized and has been published in numerous journals, including the Brooklyn Review and Sinister Wisdom. “Dancing the Polka” is her first piece in Thimble.
Janet Mason, author 