Celebrating Pride’s Dykes on Bikes in Loving Artemis — #areading #amreading #YouTube

In honor of my novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love and marriage (Thorned Heart Press; 2022) being featured in the Pride issue of Jae’s Pride issue of Sapphic Bingo, I’m reposting this short section of the beginning of Loving Artemis.

It is my pleasure to bring you this opening of my novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love and marriage (published by Thorned Heart Press) that I read recently at an online reading. The excerpt is on YouTube and below that is the text. The novel starts out when one of the narrators is in midlife and attends the New York Pride march in 2012. This narrator sees a woman who reminds her of an old flame in her youth in the late 1970s and she wonders what made Art (short for Artemis) Art.

Enjoy!

Grace stood on the crowded sidewalk and watched the Dykes on Bikes contingent kick off the parade. The skyscrapers on both sides of Fifth Avenue echoed the roar: rage turned celebratory.
Today was their day.
Pride.
Motorcycles, full of motion, crawled at parade speed. Hands gripped controls at the ends of shiny handlebars. Engines revved.
Rainbow flags rippled red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. Horizontal stripes danced. The colors represented the many nationalities and ethnic groups — all of them — in the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) community. Like a telephoto lens, Grace focused in on a woman in the center of the crowd, and mirrored sunglasses stared back. The woman’s short, mahogany hair looked like it had been carved by the air, like wings. A thrill shimmied up Grace’s spine. The woman was riding slowly. but in Grace’s imagination, she zoomed. She reminded Grace of a girl from her adolescence, her lover (even though they didn’t call it that then), a girl named Art. Maybe Art had blazed through time — from high school to the present nearly three decades and a world of difference later.
Art had been short for something, but Grace couldn’t remember what. Grace had known Art so long ago that it felt like a previous life; one that Grace never talked about. No one knew about her past except Thalia, Grace’s partner of twenty-four years. Thalia was a compassionate person. She almost always saw the best in everyone. Her voice lilted. Her hair fell to her shoulders in a cascade of loose curls of silver and shades of blond and brown. Beyond salt and pepper, her hair resembled shades of light. When Thalia looked up at Grace, her hair framed her face. Her crown caught the light and a halo appeared.
When Thalia listened intensely, her deep-set blue eyes enveloped Grace. One time, when Grace mentioned that “No one believes me when I talk about my past.”
Thalia responded by saying somberly, “I believe you.”
In that moment, Grace relaxed into herself. Thalia made her feel understood. She was safe with Thalia.
Grace never mentioned her past, even to her friends. She made sure never to tell her students. What kind of example would that set?
Grace hadn’t used drugs for years and dealing them was in her past. She had come to understand that life was too precious to risk.
She had seen firsthand that actions had consequences. Even Thalia had her limits. Before becoming involved with Grace, she had been involved with a woman who had a drinking problem and who got involved in messy situations. Thalia made it clear that the relationship hadn’t lasted long.
Grace knew she was lucky

To order my most recently published novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love, and marriage, click here:

To see the Pride issue of The Sapphic Book Bingo, click here.

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Janet Mason reading from Art, a novel of revolution love and marriage —

(I presented this novel excerpt at the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Restoration in Philadelphia where I am a lay minister.  The segment is also on You Tube. Click here  to see the video or you can view the segment below and below that on this blog, you can read the excerpt. (At the bottom of this post is another video link to YouTube featuring me reading from a different part of Art — and talking about the Saints.)

Unitarian Universalism is a faith that encompasses all religious/spiritual backgrounds (including atheism, agnosticism and Buddhism) in a “free and responsible search for truth and meaning”.)

 

This excerpt is from a novel that I wrote recently titled Art: a revolution of love and marriage.  The novel is based on the working class landscape in which I grew up and takes place in the seventies.  The main character is named Art and is based on a real person (who is not me). So here is a short excerpt from her story. The Supreme Court ruling in favor of marriage equality is a good hint at the happy ending.

 Art, a revolution of love and marriage

Art strode from the counter, past the grill and the fryers and into the backroom.  She tore her yellow headscarf off triumphantly as she clocked out.  Then she put on her sweater and her padded royal blue jacket. She slammed the metal back door behind her.

The sun was setting. It was about ten after five.  Her brother was scheduled to pick her up at five thirty. Art stood behind the building. She put up her hood and looked up. The sky was streaked with violet.  Long white wisps of clouds unfurled like banners. A single bright star came out from behind a cloud.  She watched it for a moment.  It stayed in one place so she knew it was a star, not an airplane.  It was bright enough to be a planet: either Jupiter or Venus.

She thought about the fact that the star was light years away.  Maybe her junior year physics teacher was right.  Perhaps they were made from the stars they wished on. Most of the atoms spinning around in her body were made from stardust. Art would never admit it — in physics class last year, she had just rolled her eyes along with the others — but the fact was that she did have dreams.  She wished that she could be with Linda forever. She wished that Linda’s mother would stop telling her daughter that it was a waste of time to study trigonometry and that she would stop telling Linda that her life was going to turn out just like hers. She stared at the star.  It was so bright that it seemed to be burning a hole in the winter sky.  She wished she and Linda could make a life together.  She wished they could get married.  She wished that they could even have a kid or two. But first they had to get through this last year of high school. Getting into the trig class would be easy compared to the rest.

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