Journal of Lesbian Studies
ISSN: 1089-4160 (Print) 1540-3548 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wjls20
Introduction: “Where Would I Be Without You” Cheryl Clarke & Julie R. Enszer To cite this article: Cheryl Clarke & Julie R. Enszer (2015) Introduction: “Where Would I Be Without You”, Journal of Lesbian Studies, 19:3, 275-289, DOI: 10.1080/10894160.2015.1028238 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2015.1028238
Published online: 15 Jun 2015.
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Date: 06 November 2015, At: 05:35
Journal of Lesbian Studies, 19:275–289, 2015 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1089-4160 print / 1540-3548 online DOI: 10.1080/10894160.2015.1028238
Introduction: “Where Would I Be Without You”
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CHERYL CLARKE and JULIE R. ENSZER Where Would I Be Without You, the first and only poetry recording from Olivia Records, offers a glimpse into the powerful friendship and artistic collaboration between poets Pat Parker and Judy Grahn. Grahn and Parker met in Oakland, California in 1970, beginning an artistic collaboration and a powerful friendship that endured through Parker’s death in 1989. Grahn’s and Parker’s work spread the good news of poetry; they were integral to how we lesbians imagined our voices in the world. The articles in this special issue reconsider and pay tribute to their work. KEYWORDS Pat Parker, Judy Grahn, Olivia Records, poetry, feminist poetry, lesbian poetry, lesbians, friendship In 1977, Olivia Records released its fourth album, a spoken word record featuring the poetry of Pat Parker and Judy Grahn. It was titled, Where Would I Be Without You. The album cover has three strong, graphical figures of women drawn by Wendy Cadden, a member of the Women’s Press Collective, in blues, pinks, and purples; Cadden was Grahn’s lover and her artwork graced book and chapbook covers as well as interior pages of Grahn’s earlier poetry collections (Figure 1). On the back of the album is a list of the tracks—individual poems that each poet had selected to record. Parker’s work was on side one and included seventeen poems; Grahn’s work was on side two and included nineteen poems. Photos of Parker and Grahn enliven the back cover (Figure 2). Grahn on the upper left is photographed in profile looking toward Parker; Parker in the upper right in profile looks toward Grahn on the left. These facing images intimate the affection between the two women, both poets, both butches. A line of photographs across the bottom features Grahn and Parker together and separately, smiling and serious, reveling in a moment of power and poetry. Also on the back is a selection from Grahn’s poem “Anathema,” describing women’s poetry:
Address correspondence to Julie R. Enszer, 6910 Wells Parkway, University Park, MD 20782. E-mail: [email protected] 275
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FIGURE 1 The front cover of Where Would I Be Without You, Designed by Wendy Cadden © The Women’s Press Collective. Used with permission.
art is not a way out, there is no way out. there is only what we’ve got and how to turn it around to reinforce our fighting genius; to clarify and point out what has been stolen from us and that we must take it back or continue with nothing. at its best it comes from our bitterest anger, our most expansive love, our most courageous hopes, our most vital visions, our most honest insights, our fiercest determination. These lines sit atop the credits: engineer: Sandy Stone; cover design/photography: Wendy Cadden; insert design, typesetting: Evening Dawn
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FIGURE 2 The back cover of Where Would I Be Without You, Designed by Wendy Cadden © The Women’s Press Collective. Used with permission.
Graphics; insert printed by: Maud Gonne Press. Finally, a list of the women of Olivia. All of these women labor under Grahn’s words; under her watchful eye, they deliver their anger, love, hopes, visions, insights, and determination.1 Where Would I Be Without You contains the hopes and dreams of a movement of lesbian-feminists. It is the first and only “spoken word” album issued by Olivia Records. Recorded well in advance of the contemporary spoken word scene where lesbian spoken word/slam poets like Staceyann Chin, Andrea Gibson, Natasha Miller, Alix Olson, and Joanna Hoffman enjoy large, adoring audiences, Where Would I Be Without You places poetry in the context of music. It imagines the words of Parker and Grahn galvanizing women in the same ways that Meg Christian, Cris Williamson, Maxine Feldman, and Alix Dobkin had. Where Would I Be Without You declared
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poetry as powerful, meaningful, and moving for lesbian-feminist audiences. Of course, Parker and Grahn already knew all of these things about the power of poetry. They had been performing their work, together and independently, across the United States to eager audiences. All of the poems on the album already had circulated widely in lesbian and feminist journals, newspapers, and newsletters. Parker and Grahn’s poems traveled—and so did their bodies. Wendy Stevens wrote in off our backs in the May–June 1975 issue about Parker’s visit to Washington, DC: “[I]t takes guts to start out in California and make your way cross country, having made all your contacts by mail, to read your poetry. As yet the women’s communities nationwide have not developed any network which allows for such an organized exchange.” The labor of Parker, Grahn, the women of Olivia, the Women’s Press Collective, and many other individuals and organizations created the network Stevens describes. It was unfolding even as Stevens wrote those words. Artists, activists, visionaries developed these networks. Women responded, because of the magic of the moment, and because of the charisma of Parker and Grahn. Stevens hints at Parker’s chemistry: “When Pat Parker, a black lesbian writer, sat and read her poetry to about sixty women at E. Lois “Sharon” Gomillion’s home—I heard a woman who had taken her message into her own arms and sought to spread it finely to each woman along the way.”2 Parker enchanted women with her words. If poetry was the medium of the movement—even as Jan Clausen was writing that poets are the movement—then Parker and Grahn were two of its most effective evangelists, traveling around the United States, reading poems and igniting the revolution.3 Where Would I Be Without You also asserted that poetry was a commercially viable enterprise. In the exuberance of the possibilities that lesbianfeminism presented to women in the mid-1970s, many women focused on how to support themselves and other artists through commercial ventures grounded in feminism and lesbianism. Olivia Records is one of these entrepreneurial ventures; their embrace of Parker and Grahn as poets reflects a belief in building a world where feminist communities supported artists and writers economically, ensuring their livelihood and the continued vibrancy of their creative work. Sadly, while Olivia Records was successful economically, the sales of Where Would I Be Without You were modest. It is the only spoken word album Olivia produced. Where Would I Be Without You offers a glimpse into the powerful friendship and artistic collaboration between Parker and Grahn. Grahn and Parker met in Oakland, California in 1970, beginning an artistic collaboration and a powerful friendship that endured through Parker’s death in 1989. Pat Parker (Figure 3) was born in 1944 in Houston, TX. In one of her early poems, “Goat Child” she tells us that her mother told her that she was a mistake and that she burst into her family prematurely and managed to “piss off” not only her mother and father with her presence but
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FIGURE 3 Pat Parker. Photo Credit: © Lynda Koolish.
also her siblings. Parker was the fourth daughter and there were not enough beds “so my sister lost her doll bed. / Another enemy quickly made.” Raised in Houston, Parker left home at seventeen and moved to Los Angeles. There she met and married African-American playwright Ed Bullins. She characterized their marriage as violent and brutal. They divorced, and she moved to the San Francisco Bay area to pursue a graduate degree at San Francisco State College. In San Francisco, she married Robert F. Parker, though by the late 1960s, she divorced him and came out as a lesbian.
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alta of Shameless Hussy Press published Parker’s first poetry collection, Child of Myself, in 1971. After that publication, Parker met Judy Grahn and Wendy Cadden who were publishing work as the Women’s Press Collective. They recruited Parker to join them. Judy Grahn (Figure 4) was born in 1940 in Chicago, IL. She grew up in Las Cruces, New Mexico, left home at seventeen and, at the age of twenty, had enlisted in the military and was living in Washington, D.C., stationed at Andrews Air Force Base. Through her dishonorable discharge from the military, Grahn had “an important counter-education,” learning “a great deal about lesbianism as a threat to the social order” and “that something was terribly wrong [in the world]—and it wasn’t me or my love for women.”4 These convictions shaped her life work as a poet and writer. While back in New Mexico recovering from an illness, Grahn met the 21-year-old Cadden. Cadden was a student at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Cadden telegrammed Grahn in 1967 then came out to visit her again and convinced her to come live in Ohio with her. At the end of the school year in 1968, she and Grahn set off on the road, originally headed for Detroit to organize workers, but they ultimately drove all of the way to Northern California, settling in San Francisco. Once in San Francisco, Grahn and Cadden met more lesbians and began organizing their lives as artists. They founded the Women’s Press Collective, first publishing an anthology, Woman to Woman (1970), then Grahn’s long poem chapbook, Edward the Dyke (1971). The Women’s Press Collective also brought Parker into their orbit. As a member of the Women’s Press Collective, Parker learned to operate the printing press; she worked with Grahn, Cadden, and the other women in the collective to publish a reissue of Child of Myself (1972) and her second collection, Pit Stop (1973). Grahn paid tribute to the energy of this “women-loving women” community in her humorous poem, “A History of Lesbianism” in Edward the Dyke and Other Poems, 1964-1970): How they came into the world the women-loving-women came in three by three and four by four the women-loving-women came in ten by ten and ten by ten again until there were more than you could count They took care of each other the best they knew how and of each other’s children, if they had any. (The Work of a Common Woman, The Crossing Press, 1978, 54)
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FIGURE 4 Judy Grahn. Photo Credit: © Lynda Koolish.
The collaborations among Grahn, Parker, and the women of the Women’s Press Collective were fertile and productive throughout the 1970s. Grahn and Parker read each other’s poetry; they organized their lives as poets, working minimally to support themselves and their collective houses and maximize time available for writing. They published work collectively that traveled well
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beyond the San Francisco Bay area, influencing lesbian-feminism around the United States. In 1977, the Women’s Press Collective and Diana Press merged. Diana Press was originally a Baltimore, Maryland-based printer and publisher whose founders, Coletta Reid and Casey Czarnik, moved to Oakland to be near Grahn and Cadden. Diana Press published Parker’s first full-length collection, Movement in Black (1978), and a chapbook of her long poem Womanslaughter (1978). Reid published hardbound editions of Parker’s Movement in Black and Grahn’s The Work of a Common Woman in 1978 because she feared that the lesbian-feminist poetry community increasingly focused on Parker and Grahn’s New York counterparts, Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich. Reid worried that as time wore on, the work of Parker and Grahn would fade while Lorde’s and Rich’s work would continue to grow in popularity and reputation. Reid imagined the publication of these two hardcover editions of Parker and Grahn situating their work more powerfully in literary and political circles. It was an excellent plan, but, unfortunately, the books were released right as controversy surrounding Diana Press increased; Diana Press began a downward spiral that ended in its collapse in 1979. The entwined literary lives of Parker and Grahn separated during the 1980s. Parker took a full-time job as the executive director of the Oakland Feminist Women’s Health Center where she worked for ten years, from 1978 until 1988. Grahn researched and wrote the first of many narrative nonfiction books, Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds (1984), which won an award from the American Library Association in 1985. Through the 1980s, Grahn had extraordinary literary output; in addition to Another Mother Tongue, she published The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition (1985), Mundane’s World: A Novel (1988), The Queen of Wands: Poetry (1982), The Queen of Swords (1987), new editions of The Work of A Common Woman (1980, 1985), and a reprint of True to Life Adventure Stories, an edited collection. During the 1980s, Firebrand Books, a lesbian-feminist press in Ithaca, NY, headed by the energetic Nancy K. Bereano, published Parker’s second full-length collection Jonestown and Other Madness (1985). During this time, Parker was diagnosed with cancer, and she died from complications of cancer in June 1989 at the age of forty-five. Parker’s lover Marty Dunham and two children, Cassidy Brown and Anastasia Dunham-Parker, survived Parker. Firebrand Books reprinted Movement in Black shortly after Parker’s death in early 1990 and again on the tenth anniversary of her passing in 1999. Currently, all of Parker’s poetry is out of print, but Sinister Wisdom will publish a new edition of the complete poems of Pat Parker as a part of the Sapphic Classics Series in 2016. Judy Grahn continues writing and publishing today.
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Forty years after the release of Where Would I Be Without You, a generation of young people do not know what record albums are. Phonographs, album covers, A side and B side, record sleeves, and liner notes are things from the past. In an age when music is most often received in a digital form, the work of Pat Parker and Judy Grahn continues to be resonant for a new generation of lesbians and feminists. The years since the release of Where Would I Be Without You–the coming of age of lesbian-feminism–have been fraught with sexual and textual disappointments: the shutdowns of women’s bookstores, presses, and journals due to lack of money and resources; the lack of critical commentary on lesbian literary efforts; the faltering of organizations because of their leaders fall in love with each other, break up, or sleep with each other outside their primary relationships–all while still sitting in the same organization meetings; and the mean-ness of the sex wars. But Judy Grahn and Pat Parker kept us believing in the good news of poetry and its situating of lesbians at the center of feminist discourse, whether or not straight feminists came to the center with us or receded to the margins in anger. Judy Grahn and Pat Parker were integral to how we lesbians imagined our voices in the world. They gave us voice. In 1973, in “The Common Women Poems,” Grahn wrote, “the common woman is as common / as the common crow. . . as the reddest wine. . . as a thunderstorm. . . . as a nail. . .” She told us lesbians that we could take up the stories of ordinary women of extraordinary courage. Grahn and Parker asserted a “dyke” identity for all to adopt, an identity integrally shaped by a desire for sex and a desire for freedom. Cheryl remembers 1978. “Varied Voices” brought Black women musicians and poets, mostly lesbian, to feminist and lesbian friendly venues throughout the country, and Pat Parker was among them, along with Linda Tillery, the late Gwen Avery, Mary Watkins, Vicki Randle, and others. She first saw Pat Parker’s “Movement in Black” performed with the voices of Watkins, Tillery, and Avery as “back-ups” in that iconic and famous feminist anthem: “Movement in Black. Movement in Black / Can’t keep em back / Movement in Black.” Later that year, she remembers reading Judy Grahn’s edited collection True to Life Adventure Stories, Vol. I (1978); she thought she would never be the same, and she was not. She took to True Life Adventure Stories like she had taken to Alice Walker’s In Love and Trouble because of the permission both gave to make working, poor, dyke, and outlaw women subjects of fiction. She wrote Grahn to tell her of her wonder and her desire to submit a story for her next collection. (Those were the days when she thought she wanted to write fiction.) Judy wrote back to say, “Cheryl. . . letters like yours keep me going.. . . There are no plans for a second volume at the moment.”
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There was a True to Life Adventure Stories, Vol. II in 1983. By then, Cheryl had moved on to poetry. Cheryl also remembers a very moving musical performance in 1982 directed by the late Calvin Hampton, one of the most gifted organists and sacred music composers in the country, who died of AIDS in 1984. Held at Columbia University in New York City, “Live or Die,” the concert featured an orchestra and a chorus performing Hampton’s compositions set to the poetry of Grahn, Parker, and Irena Klepfisz, and other gay poets. Cheryl had been invited to read Parker’s “Where Will You Be.” Grahn was in the audience and memorializes this evening in Another Mother Tongue. A beautiful contralto sang her “Praisesong,” written for her deceased lover, “Von.” Cheryl did not know Grahn was in the audience, but she will never forget that contralto. And she will never forget that chorus singing Klepfisz’s “Bashert.” She was honored later when she read Grahn’s account of the evening in Another Mother Tongue. In 1989, just after her 14-year-old nephew, Najeeb Harb, had died from a fall, Cheryl did a reading with Pat Parker (Figure 5). Parker was so vital and so political. She had a powerful voice. They read together at California State University, Los Angeles, where she met Parker’s sisters who lived in Inglewood, California. And she attended a reading Pat did later at a gay bookstore on Sunset Strip. She and Parker did a radio interview together on a Pacifica station as well. She remembers Pat’s admiration of a young butch dyke’s Western boots at a dinner given both of them. Pat sat apart as she smoked her cigarettes. As Cheryl was grieving for her nephew, she also grieved for Parker who died in June of that year. As much as the album, Where Would I Be Without You, links Parker and Grahn indelibly in the imagination and memory of lesbian-feminists, so do their paired works published by Diana Press. Parker’s 1978 Movement in Black: The Collected Poetry of Pat Parker 1961–1978 and Grahn’s The Work of a Common Woman: The Collected Poetry of Judy Grahn 1964–1977, also published in 1978, capture a dialogic relationship of out butch lesbians on the West Coast. These books prophesy and signify a brief moment of autonomous lesbian-feminist cultural production. Parker and Grahn appear in scholarly literature, although not as prominently as Lorde and Rich—as Reid predicted. Grahn’s work is more consistently mentioned and cited than Parker’s work, which is too often ignored. Linda Garber’s Identity Poetics: Race, Class, and the Lesbian-Feminist Roots of Queer Theory offers the most in-depth contemporary treatment of both Parker and Grahn. Garber situates them equally with Lorde, ´ as critical actors in the social construction of lesbianRich, and Anzaldua feminism. In moving readings of both poets, Garber explicates the power and influence of Parker and Grahn’s work to their contemporaries and to audiences today. Kim Whitehead animates the broader movement of
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FIGURE 5 Pat Parker and Cheryl Clarke in 1989. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Cheryl Clarke. Used with permission of Cheryl Clarke.
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feminist poetry built on feminist activism in The Feminist Poetry Movement in which Grahn and Parker are significant actors. Earlier critics, such as Mary Carruthers, Bonnie Zimmerman, Pamela Annas, Dympna Callaghan, Maida Tilchen, and Sue-Ellen Case, also engaged Grahn’s and Parker’s poetry. These critical attentions remain important, but continued critical engagements ensure that the work of Parker and Grahn continues to reach and influence new generations of readers, writers, and thinkers. In the special issue, “Where Would I be Without You”: Judy Grahn and Pat Parker, The Journal of Lesbian Studies presents eight new articles on these two stalwarts of lesbian-feminist poetry. These articles represent the next generation’s reception of work of these two iconic lesbian writers. “Olivia Records: The Production of a Movement” by Bonnie Morris offers critical context on the importance of Olivia Records as an empowering force for lesbian expression during the seventies. It is also a point of connection for all the articles, not only because Olivia produced “Where Would I Be Without You,” but because its artists through “song, drumbeat, and laughter. . . gave countless women the courage to come out.” “Unpacking Pat Parker: Intersections and Revolutions in ‘Movement in Black”’ by Amy Washburn offers a sustained engagement with Pat Parker as an artist and activist. Washburn examines how Parker used poetry to articulate intersectionality and explore and decry systemic inequalities. Washburn argues that Parker “enriches the more common and individualistic energies of autobiographic writing and social movements” through a close reading of the poem “Movement in Black” and through a broader consideration of Parker’s poetry and its articulations about diversity and democracy. David B. Green, Jr.’s article, “‘Anything That Gets Me in My Heart’: Pat Parker’s Poetry of Justice,” analyzes Parker’s examination of the deadly contradictions produced by the American “(in)justice”system” and its violations of “vulnerable communities.” Citing her use of “anaphora,” Green interprets this technique of repetition to “underscore” this culture’s repeated violations. In her article, “‘The Day All of the Different Parts of Me Can Come Along,”’ Mimi Iimuro Van Ausdall puts Pat Parker’s work in dialogue with the work of another San Francisco bay-area contemporary, Willyce Kim. Van Ausdall argues that Kim’s work, also published by the Women’s Press Collective, alongside Parker’s work illuminates an important genealogical history of the concepts of “Third World Feminism” and “Intersectionality.” With similar historical gestures, Chelsea Del Rio’s “Voicing Gay Women’s Liberation: Judy Grahn and the Shaping of Lesbian Feminism” demonstrates how central Grahn’s thinking was to lesbian-feminism both in the local San Francisco Bay area and nationally. Rusty Marilee Rust’s “‘A Geography of Disparate Spirits’: Pathology as Oppression in ‘A Woman is Talking to Death’ and ‘Mental’” explores in Grahn’s poems, the pathologization of women vis-`a-vis the mental health
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system in this country. She considers the two poems cited in the article’s title, using Grahn’s earlier critique of the mental health system, “The Psychoanalysis of Edward the Dyke,” as a forecast of “A Woman is Talking to Death” and “Mental.” Yet, more importantly, Grahn helps us transform “lesbian” from just the “homosexual woman,” to the woman who refuses to be with or be defined by a man. Grahn emerges, thus far, like Parker, as witness to the systemic violences done to women, Blacks, lesbians, and people with mental illness. Kazim Ali’s article, “‘The Killer Will Remain Free’: On Pat Parker and the Poetics of Madness” brings us boldly and squarely into 2014 with the Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York, police murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, two unarmed young Black men. Ali analyzes Pat Parker’s poetics in Jonestown and Other Madness as statements of the inseparability of politics, history, the person, and the institutional violences to which no one is immune, particularly Black women and men. He also compares the poetics of anger apparent in Parker and her contemporary, Audre Lorde. On a less weighty but no less serious note, Andreana Clay’s “Intergenerational Yearnings and Other ‘Acts of Perversion’: Or Where Would I Be Without Lesbian Drumming” plays on the issue’s title to reminisce about a very well-known 2007 San Francisco event that commemorated the lives of Lorde and Parker, “Sister Comrade.” Yet, it is comrade Judy Grahn’s joke about her close friend Parker and her (Parker’s) love of Western gear that has stayed with Clay for the past seven years. The event becomes a touchstone for a kind of nostalgia about “something missing in the author’s own quest for queer community,” and what she imagines is Parker’s and Grahn’s intimacy around race. We hope these articles jog the memories of those readers who also remember witnessing Judy Grahn and Pat Parker either together or solo, somewhere on the West Coast or the East Coast or on the many lesbian borderlands in between. We also hope that the articles bring Parker’s and Grahn’s public work into focus for those of our readers who are in the next generation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) readership and are wondering “What Ever Happened to LesbianFeminism?” Our partnership as co-editors in some ways mirrors the partnership between Parker and Grahn. We are both poets; we are both committed to helping each other promote our creative and artistic work. We are what happened to lesbian-feminism. Clarke is African American; Enszer is White. Our partnership is also an intergenerational one. Clarke was born just three years after Pat Parker and is in many ways a contemporary to both Grahn and Parker, although her creative work came into wide circulation in the 1980s. Enszer was just seven years old when Olivia Records released Where Would I Be Without You. Embracing these similarities and differences, both
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of us embraced this project of soliciting and editing a series of academic articles engaging the work of Parker and Grahn. This issue is the result of our labor; it is our whisper to the common women of the future. Can’t keep ‘em back.
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NOTES 1. A reproduction of the album cover is available at Queer Music Heritage. http:// queermusicheritage.com/olivia-ppjg.html (accessed February 27, 2015). 2. Wendy Stevens, “Pat Parker: Reading Her Work,” off our backs, vol. 5, no. 5 (May–June 1975): 16. 3. Jan Clausen, A Movement of Poets: Thoughts on Poetry and Feminism (Brooklyn, NY: Long Haul Press, 1982): 1. 4. Judy Grahn, A Simple Revolution: The Making of an Activist Poet (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012): 67.
CONTRIBUTORS Cheryl Clarke is the author of four books of poetry, Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women (1982), Living as a Lesbian (1986), Humid Pitch (1989), and Experimental Love (1993); the critical study, After Mecca: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement (Rutgers Press, 2005), and The Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry 1980-2005 (Carroll and Graf, 2006). Although she has written many essays over the years relevant to the Black queer community, “Lesbianism: An Act of Resistance,” which first appeared in the iconic This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color (Anzaldua and Moraga, eds., 1982) and “The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community,” which was published in the equally iconic Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (Smith, ed., 1984) continue to be favorites. She received the Kessler Award from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center in 2013. She finally retired from Rutgers University in July of 2013 after 41 years of studying, teaching, and administration on the New Brunswick campus. With Barbara J. Balliet, her partner of twenty-two years, she is co-owner of Blenheim Hill Books in Hobart, the Book Village of the Catskills. She is one of the organizers of the annual Festival of Women Writers in Hobart, N.Y. Julie R. Enszer’s book manuscript, A Fine Bind: Lesbian-Feminist Publishing from 1969 through 1989, tells stories about a dozen lesbian-feminist publishers to consider the meaning of the theoretical and political formations of lesbian-feminism, separatism, and cultural feminism. Enszer is the curator of the Lesbian Poetry Archive, www.LesbianPoetryArchive.org. She is the author of Sisterhood (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2013) and Handmade Love (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2010). She is editor of Milk & Honey: A Celebration of Jewish Lesbian Poetry (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2011). Milk &
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Honey was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry. She is the editor of Sinister Wisdom, a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal, and a regular book reviewer for the Lambda Book Report and Calyx. You can read more of her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.
ISSN: 1089-4160 (Print) 1540-3548 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wjls20
Introduction: “Where Would I Be Without You” Cheryl Clarke & Julie R. Enszer To cite this article: Cheryl Clarke & Julie R. Enszer (2015) Introduction: “Where Would I Be Without You”, Journal of Lesbian Studies, 19:3, 275-289, DOI: 10.1080/10894160.2015.1028238 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2015.1028238
Published online: 15 Jun 2015.
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Date: 06 November 2015, At: 05:35
Journal of Lesbian Studies, 19:275–289, 2015 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1089-4160 print / 1540-3548 online DOI: 10.1080/10894160.2015.1028238
Introduction: “Where Would I Be Without You”
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CHERYL CLARKE and JULIE R. ENSZER Where Would I Be Without You, the first and only poetry recording from Olivia Records, offers a glimpse into the powerful friendship and artistic collaboration between poets Pat Parker and Judy Grahn. Grahn and Parker met in Oakland, California in 1970, beginning an artistic collaboration and a powerful friendship that endured through Parker’s death in 1989. Grahn’s and Parker’s work spread the good news of poetry; they were integral to how we lesbians imagined our voices in the world. The articles in this special issue reconsider and pay tribute to their work. KEYWORDS Pat Parker, Judy Grahn, Olivia Records, poetry, feminist poetry, lesbian poetry, lesbians, friendship In 1977, Olivia Records released its fourth album, a spoken word record featuring the poetry of Pat Parker and Judy Grahn. It was titled, Where Would I Be Without You. The album cover has three strong, graphical figures of women drawn by Wendy Cadden, a member of the Women’s Press Collective, in blues, pinks, and purples; Cadden was Grahn’s lover and her artwork graced book and chapbook covers as well as interior pages of Grahn’s earlier poetry collections (Figure 1). On the back of the album is a list of the tracks—individual poems that each poet had selected to record. Parker’s work was on side one and included seventeen poems; Grahn’s work was on side two and included nineteen poems. Photos of Parker and Grahn enliven the back cover (Figure 2). Grahn on the upper left is photographed in profile looking toward Parker; Parker in the upper right in profile looks toward Grahn on the left. These facing images intimate the affection between the two women, both poets, both butches. A line of photographs across the bottom features Grahn and Parker together and separately, smiling and serious, reveling in a moment of power and poetry. Also on the back is a selection from Grahn’s poem “Anathema,” describing women’s poetry:
Address correspondence to Julie R. Enszer, 6910 Wells Parkway, University Park, MD 20782. E-mail: [email protected] 275
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FIGURE 1 The front cover of Where Would I Be Without You, Designed by Wendy Cadden © The Women’s Press Collective. Used with permission.
art is not a way out, there is no way out. there is only what we’ve got and how to turn it around to reinforce our fighting genius; to clarify and point out what has been stolen from us and that we must take it back or continue with nothing. at its best it comes from our bitterest anger, our most expansive love, our most courageous hopes, our most vital visions, our most honest insights, our fiercest determination. These lines sit atop the credits: engineer: Sandy Stone; cover design/photography: Wendy Cadden; insert design, typesetting: Evening Dawn
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FIGURE 2 The back cover of Where Would I Be Without You, Designed by Wendy Cadden © The Women’s Press Collective. Used with permission.
Graphics; insert printed by: Maud Gonne Press. Finally, a list of the women of Olivia. All of these women labor under Grahn’s words; under her watchful eye, they deliver their anger, love, hopes, visions, insights, and determination.1 Where Would I Be Without You contains the hopes and dreams of a movement of lesbian-feminists. It is the first and only “spoken word” album issued by Olivia Records. Recorded well in advance of the contemporary spoken word scene where lesbian spoken word/slam poets like Staceyann Chin, Andrea Gibson, Natasha Miller, Alix Olson, and Joanna Hoffman enjoy large, adoring audiences, Where Would I Be Without You places poetry in the context of music. It imagines the words of Parker and Grahn galvanizing women in the same ways that Meg Christian, Cris Williamson, Maxine Feldman, and Alix Dobkin had. Where Would I Be Without You declared
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poetry as powerful, meaningful, and moving for lesbian-feminist audiences. Of course, Parker and Grahn already knew all of these things about the power of poetry. They had been performing their work, together and independently, across the United States to eager audiences. All of the poems on the album already had circulated widely in lesbian and feminist journals, newspapers, and newsletters. Parker and Grahn’s poems traveled—and so did their bodies. Wendy Stevens wrote in off our backs in the May–June 1975 issue about Parker’s visit to Washington, DC: “[I]t takes guts to start out in California and make your way cross country, having made all your contacts by mail, to read your poetry. As yet the women’s communities nationwide have not developed any network which allows for such an organized exchange.” The labor of Parker, Grahn, the women of Olivia, the Women’s Press Collective, and many other individuals and organizations created the network Stevens describes. It was unfolding even as Stevens wrote those words. Artists, activists, visionaries developed these networks. Women responded, because of the magic of the moment, and because of the charisma of Parker and Grahn. Stevens hints at Parker’s chemistry: “When Pat Parker, a black lesbian writer, sat and read her poetry to about sixty women at E. Lois “Sharon” Gomillion’s home—I heard a woman who had taken her message into her own arms and sought to spread it finely to each woman along the way.”2 Parker enchanted women with her words. If poetry was the medium of the movement—even as Jan Clausen was writing that poets are the movement—then Parker and Grahn were two of its most effective evangelists, traveling around the United States, reading poems and igniting the revolution.3 Where Would I Be Without You also asserted that poetry was a commercially viable enterprise. In the exuberance of the possibilities that lesbianfeminism presented to women in the mid-1970s, many women focused on how to support themselves and other artists through commercial ventures grounded in feminism and lesbianism. Olivia Records is one of these entrepreneurial ventures; their embrace of Parker and Grahn as poets reflects a belief in building a world where feminist communities supported artists and writers economically, ensuring their livelihood and the continued vibrancy of their creative work. Sadly, while Olivia Records was successful economically, the sales of Where Would I Be Without You were modest. It is the only spoken word album Olivia produced. Where Would I Be Without You offers a glimpse into the powerful friendship and artistic collaboration between Parker and Grahn. Grahn and Parker met in Oakland, California in 1970, beginning an artistic collaboration and a powerful friendship that endured through Parker’s death in 1989. Pat Parker (Figure 3) was born in 1944 in Houston, TX. In one of her early poems, “Goat Child” she tells us that her mother told her that she was a mistake and that she burst into her family prematurely and managed to “piss off” not only her mother and father with her presence but
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FIGURE 3 Pat Parker. Photo Credit: © Lynda Koolish.
also her siblings. Parker was the fourth daughter and there were not enough beds “so my sister lost her doll bed. / Another enemy quickly made.” Raised in Houston, Parker left home at seventeen and moved to Los Angeles. There she met and married African-American playwright Ed Bullins. She characterized their marriage as violent and brutal. They divorced, and she moved to the San Francisco Bay area to pursue a graduate degree at San Francisco State College. In San Francisco, she married Robert F. Parker, though by the late 1960s, she divorced him and came out as a lesbian.
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alta of Shameless Hussy Press published Parker’s first poetry collection, Child of Myself, in 1971. After that publication, Parker met Judy Grahn and Wendy Cadden who were publishing work as the Women’s Press Collective. They recruited Parker to join them. Judy Grahn (Figure 4) was born in 1940 in Chicago, IL. She grew up in Las Cruces, New Mexico, left home at seventeen and, at the age of twenty, had enlisted in the military and was living in Washington, D.C., stationed at Andrews Air Force Base. Through her dishonorable discharge from the military, Grahn had “an important counter-education,” learning “a great deal about lesbianism as a threat to the social order” and “that something was terribly wrong [in the world]—and it wasn’t me or my love for women.”4 These convictions shaped her life work as a poet and writer. While back in New Mexico recovering from an illness, Grahn met the 21-year-old Cadden. Cadden was a student at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Cadden telegrammed Grahn in 1967 then came out to visit her again and convinced her to come live in Ohio with her. At the end of the school year in 1968, she and Grahn set off on the road, originally headed for Detroit to organize workers, but they ultimately drove all of the way to Northern California, settling in San Francisco. Once in San Francisco, Grahn and Cadden met more lesbians and began organizing their lives as artists. They founded the Women’s Press Collective, first publishing an anthology, Woman to Woman (1970), then Grahn’s long poem chapbook, Edward the Dyke (1971). The Women’s Press Collective also brought Parker into their orbit. As a member of the Women’s Press Collective, Parker learned to operate the printing press; she worked with Grahn, Cadden, and the other women in the collective to publish a reissue of Child of Myself (1972) and her second collection, Pit Stop (1973). Grahn paid tribute to the energy of this “women-loving women” community in her humorous poem, “A History of Lesbianism” in Edward the Dyke and Other Poems, 1964-1970): How they came into the world the women-loving-women came in three by three and four by four the women-loving-women came in ten by ten and ten by ten again until there were more than you could count They took care of each other the best they knew how and of each other’s children, if they had any. (The Work of a Common Woman, The Crossing Press, 1978, 54)
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FIGURE 4 Judy Grahn. Photo Credit: © Lynda Koolish.
The collaborations among Grahn, Parker, and the women of the Women’s Press Collective were fertile and productive throughout the 1970s. Grahn and Parker read each other’s poetry; they organized their lives as poets, working minimally to support themselves and their collective houses and maximize time available for writing. They published work collectively that traveled well
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beyond the San Francisco Bay area, influencing lesbian-feminism around the United States. In 1977, the Women’s Press Collective and Diana Press merged. Diana Press was originally a Baltimore, Maryland-based printer and publisher whose founders, Coletta Reid and Casey Czarnik, moved to Oakland to be near Grahn and Cadden. Diana Press published Parker’s first full-length collection, Movement in Black (1978), and a chapbook of her long poem Womanslaughter (1978). Reid published hardbound editions of Parker’s Movement in Black and Grahn’s The Work of a Common Woman in 1978 because she feared that the lesbian-feminist poetry community increasingly focused on Parker and Grahn’s New York counterparts, Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich. Reid worried that as time wore on, the work of Parker and Grahn would fade while Lorde’s and Rich’s work would continue to grow in popularity and reputation. Reid imagined the publication of these two hardcover editions of Parker and Grahn situating their work more powerfully in literary and political circles. It was an excellent plan, but, unfortunately, the books were released right as controversy surrounding Diana Press increased; Diana Press began a downward spiral that ended in its collapse in 1979. The entwined literary lives of Parker and Grahn separated during the 1980s. Parker took a full-time job as the executive director of the Oakland Feminist Women’s Health Center where she worked for ten years, from 1978 until 1988. Grahn researched and wrote the first of many narrative nonfiction books, Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds (1984), which won an award from the American Library Association in 1985. Through the 1980s, Grahn had extraordinary literary output; in addition to Another Mother Tongue, she published The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition (1985), Mundane’s World: A Novel (1988), The Queen of Wands: Poetry (1982), The Queen of Swords (1987), new editions of The Work of A Common Woman (1980, 1985), and a reprint of True to Life Adventure Stories, an edited collection. During the 1980s, Firebrand Books, a lesbian-feminist press in Ithaca, NY, headed by the energetic Nancy K. Bereano, published Parker’s second full-length collection Jonestown and Other Madness (1985). During this time, Parker was diagnosed with cancer, and she died from complications of cancer in June 1989 at the age of forty-five. Parker’s lover Marty Dunham and two children, Cassidy Brown and Anastasia Dunham-Parker, survived Parker. Firebrand Books reprinted Movement in Black shortly after Parker’s death in early 1990 and again on the tenth anniversary of her passing in 1999. Currently, all of Parker’s poetry is out of print, but Sinister Wisdom will publish a new edition of the complete poems of Pat Parker as a part of the Sapphic Classics Series in 2016. Judy Grahn continues writing and publishing today.
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Forty years after the release of Where Would I Be Without You, a generation of young people do not know what record albums are. Phonographs, album covers, A side and B side, record sleeves, and liner notes are things from the past. In an age when music is most often received in a digital form, the work of Pat Parker and Judy Grahn continues to be resonant for a new generation of lesbians and feminists. The years since the release of Where Would I Be Without You–the coming of age of lesbian-feminism–have been fraught with sexual and textual disappointments: the shutdowns of women’s bookstores, presses, and journals due to lack of money and resources; the lack of critical commentary on lesbian literary efforts; the faltering of organizations because of their leaders fall in love with each other, break up, or sleep with each other outside their primary relationships–all while still sitting in the same organization meetings; and the mean-ness of the sex wars. But Judy Grahn and Pat Parker kept us believing in the good news of poetry and its situating of lesbians at the center of feminist discourse, whether or not straight feminists came to the center with us or receded to the margins in anger. Judy Grahn and Pat Parker were integral to how we lesbians imagined our voices in the world. They gave us voice. In 1973, in “The Common Women Poems,” Grahn wrote, “the common woman is as common / as the common crow. . . as the reddest wine. . . as a thunderstorm. . . . as a nail. . .” She told us lesbians that we could take up the stories of ordinary women of extraordinary courage. Grahn and Parker asserted a “dyke” identity for all to adopt, an identity integrally shaped by a desire for sex and a desire for freedom. Cheryl remembers 1978. “Varied Voices” brought Black women musicians and poets, mostly lesbian, to feminist and lesbian friendly venues throughout the country, and Pat Parker was among them, along with Linda Tillery, the late Gwen Avery, Mary Watkins, Vicki Randle, and others. She first saw Pat Parker’s “Movement in Black” performed with the voices of Watkins, Tillery, and Avery as “back-ups” in that iconic and famous feminist anthem: “Movement in Black. Movement in Black / Can’t keep em back / Movement in Black.” Later that year, she remembers reading Judy Grahn’s edited collection True to Life Adventure Stories, Vol. I (1978); she thought she would never be the same, and she was not. She took to True Life Adventure Stories like she had taken to Alice Walker’s In Love and Trouble because of the permission both gave to make working, poor, dyke, and outlaw women subjects of fiction. She wrote Grahn to tell her of her wonder and her desire to submit a story for her next collection. (Those were the days when she thought she wanted to write fiction.) Judy wrote back to say, “Cheryl. . . letters like yours keep me going.. . . There are no plans for a second volume at the moment.”
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There was a True to Life Adventure Stories, Vol. II in 1983. By then, Cheryl had moved on to poetry. Cheryl also remembers a very moving musical performance in 1982 directed by the late Calvin Hampton, one of the most gifted organists and sacred music composers in the country, who died of AIDS in 1984. Held at Columbia University in New York City, “Live or Die,” the concert featured an orchestra and a chorus performing Hampton’s compositions set to the poetry of Grahn, Parker, and Irena Klepfisz, and other gay poets. Cheryl had been invited to read Parker’s “Where Will You Be.” Grahn was in the audience and memorializes this evening in Another Mother Tongue. A beautiful contralto sang her “Praisesong,” written for her deceased lover, “Von.” Cheryl did not know Grahn was in the audience, but she will never forget that contralto. And she will never forget that chorus singing Klepfisz’s “Bashert.” She was honored later when she read Grahn’s account of the evening in Another Mother Tongue. In 1989, just after her 14-year-old nephew, Najeeb Harb, had died from a fall, Cheryl did a reading with Pat Parker (Figure 5). Parker was so vital and so political. She had a powerful voice. They read together at California State University, Los Angeles, where she met Parker’s sisters who lived in Inglewood, California. And she attended a reading Pat did later at a gay bookstore on Sunset Strip. She and Parker did a radio interview together on a Pacifica station as well. She remembers Pat’s admiration of a young butch dyke’s Western boots at a dinner given both of them. Pat sat apart as she smoked her cigarettes. As Cheryl was grieving for her nephew, she also grieved for Parker who died in June of that year. As much as the album, Where Would I Be Without You, links Parker and Grahn indelibly in the imagination and memory of lesbian-feminists, so do their paired works published by Diana Press. Parker’s 1978 Movement in Black: The Collected Poetry of Pat Parker 1961–1978 and Grahn’s The Work of a Common Woman: The Collected Poetry of Judy Grahn 1964–1977, also published in 1978, capture a dialogic relationship of out butch lesbians on the West Coast. These books prophesy and signify a brief moment of autonomous lesbian-feminist cultural production. Parker and Grahn appear in scholarly literature, although not as prominently as Lorde and Rich—as Reid predicted. Grahn’s work is more consistently mentioned and cited than Parker’s work, which is too often ignored. Linda Garber’s Identity Poetics: Race, Class, and the Lesbian-Feminist Roots of Queer Theory offers the most in-depth contemporary treatment of both Parker and Grahn. Garber situates them equally with Lorde, ´ as critical actors in the social construction of lesbianRich, and Anzaldua feminism. In moving readings of both poets, Garber explicates the power and influence of Parker and Grahn’s work to their contemporaries and to audiences today. Kim Whitehead animates the broader movement of
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FIGURE 5 Pat Parker and Cheryl Clarke in 1989. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Cheryl Clarke. Used with permission of Cheryl Clarke.
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feminist poetry built on feminist activism in The Feminist Poetry Movement in which Grahn and Parker are significant actors. Earlier critics, such as Mary Carruthers, Bonnie Zimmerman, Pamela Annas, Dympna Callaghan, Maida Tilchen, and Sue-Ellen Case, also engaged Grahn’s and Parker’s poetry. These critical attentions remain important, but continued critical engagements ensure that the work of Parker and Grahn continues to reach and influence new generations of readers, writers, and thinkers. In the special issue, “Where Would I be Without You”: Judy Grahn and Pat Parker, The Journal of Lesbian Studies presents eight new articles on these two stalwarts of lesbian-feminist poetry. These articles represent the next generation’s reception of work of these two iconic lesbian writers. “Olivia Records: The Production of a Movement” by Bonnie Morris offers critical context on the importance of Olivia Records as an empowering force for lesbian expression during the seventies. It is also a point of connection for all the articles, not only because Olivia produced “Where Would I Be Without You,” but because its artists through “song, drumbeat, and laughter. . . gave countless women the courage to come out.” “Unpacking Pat Parker: Intersections and Revolutions in ‘Movement in Black”’ by Amy Washburn offers a sustained engagement with Pat Parker as an artist and activist. Washburn examines how Parker used poetry to articulate intersectionality and explore and decry systemic inequalities. Washburn argues that Parker “enriches the more common and individualistic energies of autobiographic writing and social movements” through a close reading of the poem “Movement in Black” and through a broader consideration of Parker’s poetry and its articulations about diversity and democracy. David B. Green, Jr.’s article, “‘Anything That Gets Me in My Heart’: Pat Parker’s Poetry of Justice,” analyzes Parker’s examination of the deadly contradictions produced by the American “(in)justice”system” and its violations of “vulnerable communities.” Citing her use of “anaphora,” Green interprets this technique of repetition to “underscore” this culture’s repeated violations. In her article, “‘The Day All of the Different Parts of Me Can Come Along,”’ Mimi Iimuro Van Ausdall puts Pat Parker’s work in dialogue with the work of another San Francisco bay-area contemporary, Willyce Kim. Van Ausdall argues that Kim’s work, also published by the Women’s Press Collective, alongside Parker’s work illuminates an important genealogical history of the concepts of “Third World Feminism” and “Intersectionality.” With similar historical gestures, Chelsea Del Rio’s “Voicing Gay Women’s Liberation: Judy Grahn and the Shaping of Lesbian Feminism” demonstrates how central Grahn’s thinking was to lesbian-feminism both in the local San Francisco Bay area and nationally. Rusty Marilee Rust’s “‘A Geography of Disparate Spirits’: Pathology as Oppression in ‘A Woman is Talking to Death’ and ‘Mental’” explores in Grahn’s poems, the pathologization of women vis-`a-vis the mental health
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system in this country. She considers the two poems cited in the article’s title, using Grahn’s earlier critique of the mental health system, “The Psychoanalysis of Edward the Dyke,” as a forecast of “A Woman is Talking to Death” and “Mental.” Yet, more importantly, Grahn helps us transform “lesbian” from just the “homosexual woman,” to the woman who refuses to be with or be defined by a man. Grahn emerges, thus far, like Parker, as witness to the systemic violences done to women, Blacks, lesbians, and people with mental illness. Kazim Ali’s article, “‘The Killer Will Remain Free’: On Pat Parker and the Poetics of Madness” brings us boldly and squarely into 2014 with the Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York, police murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, two unarmed young Black men. Ali analyzes Pat Parker’s poetics in Jonestown and Other Madness as statements of the inseparability of politics, history, the person, and the institutional violences to which no one is immune, particularly Black women and men. He also compares the poetics of anger apparent in Parker and her contemporary, Audre Lorde. On a less weighty but no less serious note, Andreana Clay’s “Intergenerational Yearnings and Other ‘Acts of Perversion’: Or Where Would I Be Without Lesbian Drumming” plays on the issue’s title to reminisce about a very well-known 2007 San Francisco event that commemorated the lives of Lorde and Parker, “Sister Comrade.” Yet, it is comrade Judy Grahn’s joke about her close friend Parker and her (Parker’s) love of Western gear that has stayed with Clay for the past seven years. The event becomes a touchstone for a kind of nostalgia about “something missing in the author’s own quest for queer community,” and what she imagines is Parker’s and Grahn’s intimacy around race. We hope these articles jog the memories of those readers who also remember witnessing Judy Grahn and Pat Parker either together or solo, somewhere on the West Coast or the East Coast or on the many lesbian borderlands in between. We also hope that the articles bring Parker’s and Grahn’s public work into focus for those of our readers who are in the next generation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) readership and are wondering “What Ever Happened to LesbianFeminism?” Our partnership as co-editors in some ways mirrors the partnership between Parker and Grahn. We are both poets; we are both committed to helping each other promote our creative and artistic work. We are what happened to lesbian-feminism. Clarke is African American; Enszer is White. Our partnership is also an intergenerational one. Clarke was born just three years after Pat Parker and is in many ways a contemporary to both Grahn and Parker, although her creative work came into wide circulation in the 1980s. Enszer was just seven years old when Olivia Records released Where Would I Be Without You. Embracing these similarities and differences, both
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of us embraced this project of soliciting and editing a series of academic articles engaging the work of Parker and Grahn. This issue is the result of our labor; it is our whisper to the common women of the future. Can’t keep ‘em back.
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NOTES 1. A reproduction of the album cover is available at Queer Music Heritage. http:// queermusicheritage.com/olivia-ppjg.html (accessed February 27, 2015). 2. Wendy Stevens, “Pat Parker: Reading Her Work,” off our backs, vol. 5, no. 5 (May–June 1975): 16. 3. Jan Clausen, A Movement of Poets: Thoughts on Poetry and Feminism (Brooklyn, NY: Long Haul Press, 1982): 1. 4. Judy Grahn, A Simple Revolution: The Making of an Activist Poet (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012): 67.
CONTRIBUTORS Cheryl Clarke is the author of four books of poetry, Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women (1982), Living as a Lesbian (1986), Humid Pitch (1989), and Experimental Love (1993); the critical study, After Mecca: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement (Rutgers Press, 2005), and The Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry 1980-2005 (Carroll and Graf, 2006). Although she has written many essays over the years relevant to the Black queer community, “Lesbianism: An Act of Resistance,” which first appeared in the iconic This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color (Anzaldua and Moraga, eds., 1982) and “The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community,” which was published in the equally iconic Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (Smith, ed., 1984) continue to be favorites. She received the Kessler Award from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center in 2013. She finally retired from Rutgers University in July of 2013 after 41 years of studying, teaching, and administration on the New Brunswick campus. With Barbara J. Balliet, her partner of twenty-two years, she is co-owner of Blenheim Hill Books in Hobart, the Book Village of the Catskills. She is one of the organizers of the annual Festival of Women Writers in Hobart, N.Y. Julie R. Enszer’s book manuscript, A Fine Bind: Lesbian-Feminist Publishing from 1969 through 1989, tells stories about a dozen lesbian-feminist publishers to consider the meaning of the theoretical and political formations of lesbian-feminism, separatism, and cultural feminism. Enszer is the curator of the Lesbian Poetry Archive, www.LesbianPoetryArchive.org. She is the author of Sisterhood (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2013) and Handmade Love (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2010). She is editor of Milk & Honey: A Celebration of Jewish Lesbian Poetry (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2011). Milk &
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Honey was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry. She is the editor of Sinister Wisdom, a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal, and a regular book reviewer for the Lambda Book Report and Calyx. You can read more of her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.
