Conversation in aaduna

I recently had the honor and privilege of having a Conversation with William E. Berry, Jr., Publisher & CEO, of aaduna literary magazine.  The journal published my novel excerpt “The Mother”  and nominated it for a Pushcart Prize.

Below is an excerpt from the Conversation and a link to the full piece in aaduna:

Janet Mason:

First off, thanks bill for your compliments about my work in aaduna.  I feel honored that you described it as having an “intriguing intensity,” “subtle edginess,” and a “provocative premise.”  The inspiration for my novel She And He, which “The Mother” came from, reflects several sources.  I review books for The Huffington Post and the radio syndicate “This Way Out” based in Los Angeles, and three of the books I reviewed that influenced me were on transgender topics.  The other major influence was reading the Bible pretty much for the first time which gave me a fresh take on it.

I wanted to write something fun and upbeat based on this landscape — and come to think of it, I did put a fair amount of myself into it.  I am tall and because of my height and angularity, I am frequently called “Sir.”  And though I identify as female, I have always identified with male and female interests.  When I was a child, I had an imaginary friend who was a boy my age who lived in my mind.  I actually didn’t think of this until now, but this must have influenced my thinking of having a line of intersex characters that are born in “The Mother” and the intersexed twins Tamar and Yeshua.  Tamar, the narrator of the story, indentifies primarily as female but is born intersexed.  And her brother, Yeshua (Hebrew for Jesus) identifies as male but was born intersexed.

I think my life is pretty normal — normal for me!  I spent a lot of time alone writing and I also garden (this summer I planted and harvested a lot of pumpkins and carnival squash).  My partner, who I live in an old farmhouse with, is retired from the postal system, and is a fabulous cook.  I take long walks everyday and do yoga and a Buddhist meditation practice almost daily, so my day to day is pretty tame but it suits me.

to read the rest of the Conversation, click here

“The Mother” is an excerpt from my novel in process, She And He.  It is loosely based on a character (Tamar) from the Hebrew Bible, and is told from the spin of how independent women and gender-variant characters not only survived but thrived in ancient times.

You can see a skit from She And He on YouTube .  The skit was done at the Unitarian Universal Church of the Restoration in Philadelphia.

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

Another excerpt is forthcoming this year in Sinister Wisdom —coming out in April.

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Trump or Treat: lessons in anthropology — originally in The Huffington Post

“It could happen. Trump could get elected. Hitler was elected, you know,” said an older friend of mine.

My friend and I were sitting in a college classroom where we are taking a class together in anthropology and photography.

It’s the first time that I’ve been back in a college classroom as a student since graduating in 1981.

I have to admit, it’s kind of confusing. It’s not so much the coursework that’s confusing, it’s the students — mostly female and mostly undergraduate — that I don’t understand.

They seem to have bought the myth of consumerism.

We were in the classroom and there were titters all around after my friend spoke. I suspect that the students agreed with her and that deep down they know she’s right. She’s a retired high school teacher and something interesting is bound to  pop out of her mouth at full volume.

The attitudes in the class shouldn’t be a complete surprise to me. I have heard that the younger generation tends to be consumer oriented.  It is, after all, what they have been taught. Another friend told me about her straight niece, who just had an over the top wedding, with a lesbian friend who is planning her over the top wedding (complete with a photo booth which is in these days).

The only difference between the two is that the young lesbian is marrying her girlfriend and won’t be living a life of secrecy and shame. My first impulse was to feel sorry for the parents.  With what an over the top wedding costs, there goes retirement. My second thought is a sarcastic: so that’s what we fought for all those years.

An extravagant lesbian wedding? Really?

But then I realized that every generation has to define itself. And we had fun in the struggle. My partner is a drummer and we marched with drumming contingents in marches and rallies in Philadelphia, Washington D.C., New York.  The rocks thrown at our bedroom window (more than ten years ago) weren’t fun.  Neither were the insults hurled at us on the streets in our respective work places over the years.

However, we loved being outlaws.

So despite that one of my favorite slogans was “tip over patriarchy,” I am forced to acknowledge that the young lesbian planning her over the top wedding is a kind of progress.

But there is something to what my friend said. I went home and did a quick search and found out that she was right. Hitler was elected.  The “History” website says, “in 1934, Adolf Hitler, already chancellor, is also elected president of Germany in an unprecedented consolidation of power in the short history of the republic.”

Aside from Sanders’ self definition as a socialist (which like it or not most Americans don’t understand) and his well-documented difficulty with Black voters,

there are solid reasons that I am supporting Hillary Clinton.

For one thing, Hillary has a strong background on Civil Rights and racial justice.

And I saw Hillary march in the New York Pride Parade during her years as a NY state senator. (She was the only person wearing high heels — except the drag queens.)

And I think we are long overdue for a female president. We have a lot riding on this election — including the continuation of the Affordable Care Act, Social Security, and marriage equality, just to name a few issues that affect me personally.

Hillary is tough and it is easy to picture her holding her own in a debate with whoever the Republicans put forth, including Trump.

The title of this piece came from a sign outside of a chain drugstore that read “Trunk or Treat.”

I am not much of a consumer and had no idea what it meant. I put my own meaning on it.

I commented to my partner that I thought it said “Trump or Treat.”

“Trump is the trick,” she replied. And then she suggested that I write this piece.

She’s right, of course. Trump is the trick.

Let’s not get duped.

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In Atlantic City, an evening of jazz — Chicken Bone Beach — Photographs!

 

 

One of our favorite things to do in the summer is to go to the free jazz concert series on Thursday nights in Atlantic City.  The music is at the Pavilion, across from the Convention Center.  This is the lower-part of the boardwalk (largely casino-free).  I found myself wondering what the boardwalk would be like without the casinos.  Maybe not so bad!

On a break between concerts, I took and stroll on the boardwalk and found to my delight, bubbles!

 

 My partner Barbara sitting in the audience at the Chicken Bone Jazz Series in Atlantic City.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 The gull on a green clay rooftop reminds me of antiquity!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Everyone is searching for something on the boardwalk — there it is floating by in the sea air!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pure glee!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mimi Jones on acoustic bass.  She rocks!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the beach, near the convention center – a lifeboat, guard stand and the horizon.

 

 

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Lesbian Author Tackles Edmund White, Gains a Deeper Understanding of the Gay Icon, the Writer, the Human Being

from The Huffington Post

I knew about Edmund White as a writer long before I read his books. I knew that he was a gay icon and had written many books, fiction and nonfiction. I knew that he was especially known for his coming of age novel, A Boy’s Own Story, written in 1982, around the time that I came out. I knew that he had lived in Paris for a time and had written a biography of Jean Genet, the controversial French poet, playwright and novelist who was born in 1910.

When I heard about White’s latest book, Inside a Pearl, My Years in Paris (2014, Bloomsbury), I decided that it was time to read Edmund White. As a lesbian writer, even as one who has known many interesting people, I have very little in common with White. When I started reading Inside a Pearl — which is replete with namedropping — complete with a description of one of Elton John’s parties, this became clear to me. But for whatever reasons I have long been interested in Paris thanks to Gertrude Stein and the Left Bank Sapphic crowd — I kept reading. And what I found was an Edmund White I could relate to — one who could lay his life on the page.

It was when I read about White’s experiences as a caretaker of friends and lovers with HIV and being HIV positive himself — along with the ups and down of his friendships with both men and women — that I began to relate to him. His vulnerabilities made him human. He ruminates about his decision to live in Paris:

“I asked myself why I was here. Sure, I’d won a Guggenheim and a small but regular contract with Vogue to write once a month of cultural life. Right now I was writing a piece about why Americans like Proust so much. Back in America I’d worked around clock heading the New York Institute for the Humanities and teaching writing at Columbia and New York University. I never seemed to have time for my own writing. When I was president of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the biggest and oldest AIDS organization in the world, I hadn’t liked myself in the role of leader; I was power mad and tyrannical… And secretly I’d wanted the party to go on and thought that moving the Europe would give me a new lease on promiscuity. Paris was meant to be an AIDS holiday. After all, I was of the Stonewall generation, equating sexual freedom with freedom itself. But by 1984 many gay guys I knew were dying in Paris as well — there was no escaping the disease.”

White goes on to write about his life in Paris about the friendships that he forged, many through his writing projects, about his lovers — his “great love” was “from Zurich, the manager of a small chain of Swiss cinemas, whom I met in Venice” — and his familiarity with French customs. “The French seldom drank after the wine was cleared away with the meal — wine is a good, not a conversation enabler to be poured hours after the dinner.”

He also writes about the European tradition of older gay men calling their younger lovers, their “nephew.” He writes about an interaction between two gay men when one says to the other, “Do you know my nephew?” and the other replies, “Yes, he was my nephew last year.”

He writes about taking care of his former lover turned friend John Purcell who was in the advanced stages of AIDS. White tells us that he told John he would take him anywhere he wanted:

“India? France? He chose Disney World in Orlando. I thought it might be a hoot, but I found it boring and tacky. At Epcot, we went to some horrid replica of the Eiffel Tower when we’d lived in the real Paris for years.”

When White lived in Paris, he took many trips to England. He recounts the conversation at one London party. “Pat (who was notorious is London literary circles for her affair with Jeanette Winterson), looked around and said, “What’s annoying about Paris is that every woman looks like a lesbian but none is.” White goes on to write, “Pat was one of my favorite people.”

In his sardonic style, White introduces us to the cast of characters that he has met and interacted with on the road of life. Not surprisingly, many, such as Susan Sontag, did not like being written about in his previous works and he writes about that also. It is true that Edmund White has been in the company of many well-known people. But Inside a Pearl left me with was a deeper knowing of Edmund White, the gay icon, the writer, the human being.

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