Biblical stories jumping to life — #Easter2024 #Transgenderdayofvisibility2024 #amreading

How wonderful that the Transgender Day of Visibility falls on the day of the Easter holiday this year! In honor of the occasion, I decided to post Vanda’s review of my novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (Adelaide Books) that she wrote for Amazon.

Vanda, author of Juliana Series

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fanscinating Read

Reviewed in the United States on November 18, 2018

All the Bible stories from your childhood suddenly jump to life in Janet Mason’s new novel. They. The manner in which they are presented I found to be a lot of fun.
The story is about a woman named Tamar who lives in ancient times, around the same time as Joseph who had the cool colorful coat. Tamar and her family live in tents; she is obsessed by her camel, Aziza, who she keeps reminding everyone is not a camel, but a dromedary because she only has one hump. Her friends and family don’t seem to care a fig about the difference, but it is very important to Tamar. She and her dromedary have a special relationship as important to her as her relationships with her friends. Aziz is so important to Tamar that she has her sleep inside, an action that will later bring her problems.
I, especially, enjoyed discovering Biblical characters though their stories and name. I was part of the discovery. I’m watching people from a different time period living their lives and suddenly I realize their talking about someone I know. As a young teenager I was in search for answers. so I read the Bible cover to cover looking for those answers. I don’t know that I found any answers, but I enjoyed the stories. The way the stories are told do not sound Biblical, they sound human.
The main character, Tamar, takes us through the whole book. She even dies and lives in the book as a spirt. Then she ends up in a womb until she is born again into a new life.
Gender is flexible in these Biblical stories. Although the people are as hung up about gender as we are—I guess we probably got this way because of them. The different genders appears. Tamar in her first life has an lesbian experience that she wanted to continue, but the other woman couldn’t accept Tamar’s favorite camels sleeping in the same hut. There were also intersex twins who lived their lives as males because this was the preferred sex.

You can also read an excerpt, written as standalone short fiction, in the online literary journal BlazeVOX15

Another excerpt is in the recent issue of Sinister Wisdom — the fortieth anniversary issue

A different excerpt is also in the aaduna literary magazine  (this excerpt was nominated for a Pushcart Prize)

Text excerpts from THEY and my introductions presented at UUCR (Unitarian Universalist Church of the Restoration) can be clicked on below.

To read the text to the “Descent of Ishtar” and the introduction (where I talk about ancient Babylon), click here.

To read the text to “Forty Days And Forty Nights” as well as my introduction, click here.

 THEY is available where books are sold online, from your local bookstores and library.

For more information on THEY, click here:

They: A Biblical Tale of Secret Genders: Mason, Janet: 9780999516430: Amazon.com: Books

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On Belonging — thoughts on an online #vegan spirituality community

Lately, I’ve been feeling very well — despite getting over a cold. I’ve been taking care of myself — sticking to my healthy vegan diet, drinking lots of water, and getting back to my regular walks.

One of the new things that I have been doing is going to the zoom group called A Vegan Spirituality Meetup Group. It meets weekly and connects vegans from great distances and after a brief meditation, people are able to talk about their weeks and the challenges they faced as vegans. This is the time when we strategize about how to take over the world by changing hearts and minds with yummy food and by using compassion and gratitude.

Since I just finished revising my memoir LOST: a daughter navigates father loss and discovers what it means to belong, I’ve been reflecting on the importance of belonging, something that was missing for most of my life. When I was working on this, I came across the information that the need to belong to a group is hardwired into us and is very ancient. Perhaps this is the reason there is so much defensiveness about not being vegan (because when you change what you eat, it makes you not part of the group and then your mere presence can disturb people because they have to justify their own behavior.)

So I’ve found an important group and have connected with it. In doing so, I believe I’m becoming stronger because I am taking care of my mental health. I know that by becoming vegan, I have joined a growing and mighty group. And I know that veganism is the diet of the future. But in the U.S., in particular, that growth seems to be slow. So, by connecting with others, I am becoming stronger.

To learn more about the Vegan Spirituality group on Zoom, click on https://veganmeditation.org/notifications.php

For more information on my most recent novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love, and marriage, click here.

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Bringing Together the Past and Present—#Poetry #LGBTPoetry #amreading

Lately, I’ve been bringing together the past and the present. Since I was a poet before I was a prose writer (the poems got longer, contained dialogue and demanded prose), I returned to my book When I Was Straight published in 1995 by Insight To Riot Press.

The poem I’m posting today is titled

Newborn rhythms

Seven years, almost eight,

our bodies pressing into

each other nearly every night.

The indentation of our lives;

our apartment, once large,

growing ever smaller, cramped

with what matters most: records,

cassette tapes, piles of books,

drums springing up like toad stools.

Seven years and when her mouth

wraps around me, she still sings

through my throat, and I

watching her, drum strapped to her

waist, it’s thick stemmed hollow

pressing between her thighs—

relinquish seven years

to the thunderclap, her gentle

slap on stretched skin, and

her fingers, dancing lightly

like mallets, her gentle

slap on stretched skin, and

her fingers, dancing lightly

like mallets, their newborn rhythms

raining down on my breasts.

‘I wrote the poem for my partner Barbara. To hear her accompany our late friend, the poet Toni Brown click here:

Toni Brown black lesbian poet 11/4/52 – 4/19/08 (amusejanetmason.com)

For an excerpt from my essay on Emily Dickinson, originally published in the Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly, click here: https://tealeavesamemoir.wordpress.com/2024/02/18/a-lesbian-reading-of-emily-dickinson-lgbt-lesbianlit-amreading/

To read my poem inspired by visiting the Dickinson house, click here:

Revisiting Lesbians in History: #Lesfic #EmilyDickinson #LGBT #amreading | Janet Mason, author (wordpress.com)

For more information on my most recent novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love, and marriage, click here.

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The Only Way Through Is Out—a #memoir for #InternationalWomen’sDay #amreading

In honor of International Women’s Day, I thought I’d tell you about an interesting reading happening this week in Philadelphia.

Suzette Mullen had been raised to play it safe—and she hated causing others pain. With college and law degrees, a kind and successful husband, two thriving adult sons, and an ocean-view vacation home, she lived a life many people would envy. But beneath the happy facade was a woman who watched her friends walk boldly through their lives and wondered what was holding her back from doing the same.

Digging into her past, Suzette uncovered a deeply buried truth: she’d been in love with her best friend—a woman—for nearly two decades—and still was.

Leaning into these “unspeakable” feelings would put Suzette’s identity, relationships, and life of privilege at risk—but taking this leap might be her only chance to feel fully alive. As Suzette opened herself up to new possibilities, an unexpected visit to a new city helped her discover who she was meant to be.

Introspective, bittersweet, and empowering, The Only Way Through Is Out (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024) is both a coming-out and coming-of-age story, as well as a call to action for every human who is longing to live authentically but is afraid of the cost.

When asked who she wrote The Only Way Through Is Out for, Suzette replied:” I wrote my story for every human who is longing to live out loud—including LGBTQ+ folx crushed by oppressive religious institutions; women at midlife who have deferred their own dreams; empty nesters who have stayed in unhappy marriages “for the kids”—every person who longs to live more authentically but is afraid of the cost.”

“I could not put this book down. Mullen shows us the search for one’s authentic self has no expiration date and is worth whatever it takes. This book is a glorious tale of tenacious courage that anyone searching for their own path in life will love.”

—Jennifer Louden, national bestselling author of Why Bother? Discover the Desire for What’s Next

“Candid, inspirational … An emotive memoir that issues a stirring call to women to choose self-actualization.”

—Foreword Reviews

Suzette will be in conversation with poet, essayist, and editor Athena Dixon, author most recently of The Loneliness Files, on Thursday, March 14 at 7 pm at Big Blue Marble Bookstore.https://www.bigbluemarblebooks.com/events/2024/3/14/the-only-way-through-is-out-suzette-mullen-in-conversation-with-athena-dixon

For more information on my most recent novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love, and marriage, click here.

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’Dreadlocks”: remembering an important #lesbian poet #ToniBrown

(note: this essay I wrote and am reading excerpts from was originally published in Sinister Wisdom 76: the Open Issue—Summer 09)

I recorded the excerpt from the essay for YouTube below and the text is below that.

11/4/1952 – 4/19/2008

Portrait of a friendship: in memoriam

Toni P. Brown

A true friend is hard to lose. The loss is palpable — like some previously unknown core at the center of you is suddenly ripped out, howling and empty. This is how I felt when my good friend, Toni Brown, died on April 17th, 2008. She was 55 years old.

As her Philadelphia memorial service — standing room only at The Painted Bride Art Center — confirmed, Toni was many things to many people. She was a writer — of poetry and fiction, well known in the lesbian, the African American, and the larger literary communities; she was a writing teacher to college students; and she was a teacher and a mentor to the “at-risk” teenage girls that she worked with for the last ten years in her position as director of education, training, and outreach for Girls Inc.

Toni and I were close friends for nearly 20 years — we met several years before she moved to Philadelphia. At the time, she lived in Amherst Massachusetts and was a member of a Northampton lesbian writers group. We met through a mutual friend, who was in the Philadelphia feminist writers’ group with me, at the Outwrite Conference, an LGBT writing conference held, at that time, in Boston.

A year or so later, my Philadelphia writing group went to Northampton to give a reading. I stayed at Toni’s house in Amherst and took her large gentle German Shepherd, named Zen, for a walk. Zen led me into the garden at the Emily Dickinson house — where I made a reservation for the two writing groups, now one large group, at least for the duration of our stay.

I remember all of us sitting in the large, Victorian sitting room. The drapes were drawn and there was a hush surrounding the words of the tour guide who carefully left out any mention of Emily’s lesbian passions. We didn’t contradict her, but the room was bursting with our silence. Now, reflecting back on that afternoon, I see that there was something prophetic about it. We were surrounded by the ghostly presence of Emily Dickinson even as we laughed and posed for pictures. At the time that the pictures were taken, in the Dickinson garden, some 20 years ago, Toni had a short Afro. A year later when she moved to Philadelphia, she began locking her hair-always, it seemed, twisting the tiny nubs, until they grew down below her shoulders.

After Toni moved to Philadelphia — to be with the love of her life — the two of us became closer. We took Zen for long walks in the Wissahickon. “Zen, the dog,” as we called her, would chase sticks and squirrels, the occasional deer, as Toni and I walked and talked about our writing, our lives, our loves — walking and talking, talking about everything.

….

Toni came to Philadelphia to connect with her other identities. She was a Cave Canem poetry fellow in the years 1998, 1999, and 2,000. Cave Canem was begun in 1996 as a weeklong summer workshop/ retreat designed as a “safe haven” for black poets. Toni and I read together when she returned from one of these retreats — and in her poetic voice I heard a new level of sophistication, a continuing evolvement of her work that had the feeling of a gust of air under her wings. Consider her poem Dreadlocks (published in “Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade,” University of Michigan Press, 2006).

Dreadlocks

See
these ropes of hair
This is how
It would have grown
on my head
In the bowels of a ship
long ago

Understand
We dark still living
who crawled or
were dragged
hair matted flat
into this New World
would have been
dreadful

Toni’s work was published in Sinister Wisdom, Prairie Schooner and the American Poetry Review, among other places. Her words are the quiet hush around the storm; a keen and often painful observation of detail, insight into injustice in its many forms, and at the same time a testament to love, to all that is good in the world. Her work is transcendent, just as Toni was in her life.

This is Janet Mason with commentary for Booktube and Spotify.

To hear Toni read some of her poetry, click here:

Toni Brown black lesbian poet 11/4/52 – 4/19/08 (amusejanetmason.com)

For an excerpt from my essay on Emily Dickinson, originally published in the Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly, click here: https://tealeavesamemoir.wordpress.com/2024/02/18/a-lesbian-reading-of-emily-dickinson-lgbt-lesbianlit-amreading/

To read my poem inspired by visiting the Dickinson house, click here:

Revisiting Lesbians in History: #Lesfic #EmilyDickinson #LGBT #amreading | Janet Mason, author (wordpress.com)

For more information on my most recent novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love, and marriage, click here.

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