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In Their Own Words: Part 1

In poems, short stories, graphic novels – really, in just about every genre you can imagine – LGBT writers tell stories that make us laugh, cry and, occasionally, feel a little more at home in the world. On May 29, some of this year’s best LGBT writing will be honored at the 20th Annual Lambda Literary Awards.

To join in the celebration, we asked 12 of the world’s best lesbian/bi writers to talk about the genres in which they tell their stories. They answered our questions via email, and we’re presenting their responses here in their own words.

Our two-part article begins with today’s interviews with young-adult novelist Nancy Garden, short-story writer Amy Bloom, comic-book author and illustrator Ariel Schrag, poet Joan Larkin, novelist Charlotte Mendelson and romance author Karin Kallmaker.

Nancy Garden: Young Adult Literature

Best known for the young-adult classic Annie On My Mind,Nancy Garden has written more than two dozen works, including nonfiction, mystery and fantasy for children and young adults.

AfterEllen.com: Name a few YA books or authors that inspired you to write in this genre.

Nancy Garden: Way back in the 1950s when I was around 16, in love with a girl (to whom I am now legally married and with whom I’ve been living for nearly 40 years), and beginning to realize I might be lesbian, I searched largely in vain for books that might help me figure myself out. But there were none available for kids, and for a while all I could find were cheap paperback novels with lurid covers in which the lesbian character ended up committing suicide, dying in a car crash, being sent to a mental institution, or being wooed and won by a straight man.

I know now that many of those books were written for men, but by adult lesbians, and that the only way such books could get published was for the lesbian character to be in some way “punished” at the end. Even so, many books of that kind were read and enjoyed by lesbians who were grateful to find any books at all about characters like themselves. But although I read them avidly as a teenager, they disturbed me and made me angry and discouraged.

Finally, though, I found The Well of Loneliness, written by Radclyffe Hall and published in England in 1928. It’s melodramatic and sentimental, but it’s also honest, and gave a picture of lesbian life in that era that showed that lesbians were good people (and that there were quite a lot of them!).

Radclyffe Hall made it clear that when lesbians were downtrodden victims it was because of the ignorance and bigotry of others, not through any fault or defect of their own. The Well of Loneliness ends sadly, but with an impassioned plea for justice and understanding that made me vow to write a book someday about a lesbian that would end happily. After several false starts, I finally did – Annie On My Mind, published in 1982.

AfterEllen.com: How has YA literature developed or changed in recent years, especially in regard to portrayals of lesbians and bisexuals?

NG: There are very few YA books or stories with bisexual characters, unfortunately. Sarah Ryan’s Empress of the World is the only one I know of with female characters; this is certainly an area that needs expanding! The same, by the way, is true of transgender characters, although there’s a bit more now for them.

The good news is that now, at last, more and more YA books are being published in which the lesbian character is in no way a victim. Even if a lesbian character encounters homophobia, she usually comes through it with strength and pride. Our books, too, are beginning to deal with universals as much as they deal with being gay – universals as experienced by young lesbians.

Also, more LGBT books are being published now for teens than ever before. But the bad news is that books for and about gay boys outnumber those for and about young lesbians – as (sigh!) they just about always have.

AfterEllen.com: Do you have any suggestions for women aspiring to write YA novels?

NG: First of all, read YA novels – lots and lots of them. Read whatever YAs intrigue you when you browse in bookstores and libraries (which of course you do regularly!), and also read Printz Award winners, Margaret A. Edwards Award winners, and everything you can find that’s been on ALA’s Best Books lists.

Stay as closely in touch with teens themselves as you can, especially if you want to write contemporary fiction – but beware of sticking too closely in your writing to fads in language, dress, music and other elements of popular culture. Remember that they all go out of date quickly and you want your books to last!

But most important of all, write what you truly want to write – write about what moves you, about what’s close to your heart, what you yourself would like to read.

And be careful that your characters are individuals, not types, and not mouthpieces for your “messages” about gay rights and homophobia. It’s tempting to have one’s characters preach about how cruel homophobia is and how unfairly lesbians often get treated, but your job as a novelist is primarily to tell a story. Show injustice if that’s what you want to write about. Don’t just tell about it and point out how bad it is. Show how it happens to your characters and how they handle it. Remember that the book belongs to your characters, not to you. It’s their story and you need to let them act it out.

Next page: Amy Bloom on short stories

Amy Bloom: Short Stories

Photo credit: Beth Kelly

Amy Bloom’s first short-story collection, Come to Me was a National Book Award finalist. She followed that with A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The bisexual author is currently working on her third collection of short stories, as well as a novel and the screenplay for a romantic comedy.

AfterEllen.com: Name one or more books or authors that inspired you to write short fiction; what made them particularly influential?

Amy Bloom: I was floored, at 20, by James Joyce’s The Dead. It didn’t inspire me but it sure did knock me out. Likewise, Alice Munro, Doris Lessing (a superb short-story writer), Alice Adams, John Cheever, John Updike.

AE: You write in many genres. What does short fiction allow or encourage that other genres do not?

AB: Short stories, like poetry (which I don’t write) require discipline and allow no space for self-indulgent riffs and pointless sentences. Good training and good results.

AE: Do you have any suggestions for those aspiring to write short stories?

AB:Don’t think of writing as an opportunity to show off, to be clever, to win friends or to get laid. Think of it as a chance to serve your characters, whom you have taught yourself to understand from the inside out.

AE: Which authors do you recommend among those currently writing short fiction featuring queer characters?

AB: Not too many people are writing great short stories now, I fear – queer or otherwise, although I always admire David Leavitt and David Sedaris, Rebecca Brown and Sarah Waters, who doesn’t write short anything.

AE: How do you decide if a particular story is worth finishing?

AB: I finish almost everything I begin in fiction – unless it’s so bad that throwing it out is a kindness. I wait until I’m done to decide that it’s not worth keeping.

AE: Name a favorite book outside your genre.

AB: Silence of the Lambs – brilliant at what it does.

AE: Recommend a few collections of short fiction that relate to a single subject of personal interest or expertise.

AB: Doris Lessing: Habit of Loving, A Man and Two Women; Alice Munro’s The Moons of Jupiter (I think that’s the title) – the subject is people.

Next page: Ariel Schrag on graphic novels

Ariel Schrag: Graphic Novels

Ariel Schrag has penned four autobiographical graphic novels, each chronicling one of her years at Berkeley High School. Originally published by Slave Labor Graphics, her third book, Potential, has just been reissued by Simon & Schuster, and the final book in her series, Likewise, will be out next spring.

AfterEllen.com: Marjane Satrapi insists her books should be called comics, not graphic novels. Which term do you prefer, and why?

Ariel Schrag: I would have to agree 100 percent with Marjane here. The word graphic novel is stupid. It sounds like a kid trying to use a big word and having no idea what he’s talking about. It sounds like someone being obnoxious and pronouncing Nabokov’s name correctly just to show off.

I got into this argument with someone when I was in high school about whether or not comics could be “real literature.” He was adamant that they couldn’t. They’re “comics,” he said, they’re just “comics.”

About six years later, I got an email from him apologizing for the argument. “You were right,” he said, “I read graphic novels now.” Oh, so now that they’re “graphic novels” they can be literature. Also, Maus, Persepolis and my books are not novels of any sort. The Holocaust, the Islamic Revolution and my … “teenage sexual identity journey” … are events that actually happened.

AE: Do you remember the first graphic novel you came across that featured a lesbian character?

AS:My comic book Definition, in which I decide I’m bisexual and hook up with girls for the first time, was the first comic I’d ever read featuring a lesbian character, which I think was a huge part of what made it so exciting to write.

About a year later, I found my second lesbian-starring comic, and it was this Catholic-high-school-girls-porn-thing I forget the name of. At the time, I thought it was totally awesome and the cover said it was written and drawn by two women, which was totally cool – in retrospect I’m pretty sure it was a huge farce, and was actually written and drawn by men with pseudonyms.

The main image I retain from it is of one of the girls sitting atop a giant breast, catholic skirt blowing upwards to reveal her f—ing a giant nipple. It’s the sort of thing that sticks with you.

AE: Name a favorite author outside your genre, and suggest one good book of theirs that readers should pick up first.

AS: Yes, but what is my “genre” … comics? Autobiography? Teenage? Queer? … Something that’s none of those … I know – The Game by Neil Strauss. This book is infinitely fascinating. Oops, it’s also kind of autobiography.

I know – The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. A lot of people are really down on Dawkins right now because he recently came out with the very bossy and resentful The God Delusion (which actually has some great parts if you get past the condescension), but The Selfish Gene is a classic. A simultaneously comforting and totally depressing way to look at life. All of a sudden, everything you do will seem selfish – but it’s not your fault – it’s your genes.

I also love Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies – I don’t cry that often, but this book made me cry.

AE: Which graphic novel would you recommend to lesbians who have never read a graphic novel before?

AS: Oh, I don’t know … mine.

Next page: Joan Larkin on poetry

David Ulin of the Los Angeles Times has described Joan Larkin’s work as “poetry without pity, in which despair leads not to degradation but to a kind of grace.” Her most recent poetry collection, My Body: New and Selected Poems,recently received the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry from the Publishing Triangle.

AfterEllen.com: Do you recall the first poem by or about lesbians that had a lasting effect on you?

Joan Larkin: Judy Grahn’s poem “A Woman Is Talking to Death” shocked me and changed the way I saw lesbians and the larger context of women and power. “A Woman Is Talking to Death” was news in the ’70s – poetry of love, anger, and witness addressed to women, about women, by a woman. Grahn honors our love for each other, showing that “ordinary” lesbian lives are extraordinary. I’m still moved by the strong rhythms, wild imagery and memorable words of Grahn’s poems in The Work of a Common Woman.

AE: How has the tone or content of lesbian poetry developed or changed in recent years?

JL: Though language always was and still is the bottom line for poetry, I’ll take a leap and say that lesbian poetry has grown more varied and sophisticated.

Lesbian poetry includes a wide range, from traditional to experimental, from texts meant for the page to in-your-face performance poetry. I remember waves of excitement at the first lesbian coffeehouse readings – poets were articulate spokespersons of the women’s movement. Now there are as many or even more lesbian poets writing, publishing, performing slam poetry or signing up for MFA programs.

There continue to be coming-out poems and – as in all times and places – love poems. But a new generation’s sense of permission to speak has expanded poets’ themes beyond claiming an identity. And lesbians seem to know in our bones that the world we’re living in now needs poetry – needs art and artists – more than ever. Our soul survival depends on it.

AE: What is one of the lessons you hope your students learn from you in regard to the writing of poetry?

JL: I hope that my students won’t settle for being clever or trendy and will explore the depths of their interior lives. I hope that they’ll face their own terror and mystery. I hope that they’ll read and read and read, and absorb the pleasure of the music and language of powerful poetry.

AE: What are the elements you look for in a good poem?

JL: Memorable language – a sense that this couldn’t be said any other way. Music. Emotional depth. And something unpredictable and wild that makes me want to read a poem over and over.

AE: What is it that excites you about poetry? What does poetry give us that novels or other genres do not?

JL: Poetry is music, and I love savoring the taste of the words on my tongue and feeling its rhythms take hold in my body.

Poetry is language pared to its essence, and I love the thrift that lets poets say more with less.

Poetry is immediate – not a second-hand experience, not the truth as we’ve already heard it, but a fresh encounter.

Poetry is physical. Emily Dickinson said in a letter that she recognized poetry when it “makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me” or when it made her “feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off.” I think she meant this literally, and I recognize poetry the same way.

AE: Name a few out poets you recommend. What do you appreciate about each?

JL: I’m still reading May Swenson for her fresh eye, exactness, and wit; Muriel Rukeyser for her generosity and insistence that we learn to love what we despise in ourselves; and Audre Lorde, for cleansing anger and strong music. Among the living, Adrienne Rich’s vision of us as not separate from history and politics reminds me to expand the scope of my attention, and I continue to be stunned by her articulate, sensuous language.

Next page: Charlotte Mendelson on contemporary British fiction

Charlotte Mendelson has emerged as one of the most popular and critically celebrated authors in the U.K. Her third book, When We Were Bad will be out in paperback in late September and has been shortlisted for the prestigious 2008 Orange Broadband Prize (the winner will be announced June 4).

AfterEllen.com: Name one or more books or authors that inspired you to write in this genre; what made them particularly influential?

Charlotte Mendelson: Rose Tremain and Iris Murdoch are both brilliant at describing the secret, complicated, dark little inner worlds of their often subtly un-straight characters; Sarah Waters could write about bars of soap and still be fantastic, but she writes about lesbians – how lucky we are. Oh and Jane Eyre … not remotely queer but surely the best novel ever written. Apart from Bleak House. And …

AE: How has contemporary British fiction developed or changed in recent years, especially in regard to portrayals of lesbians and bisexuals?

CM: We were always in there but lurking around the edges – or, thanks to Virago’s re-publication of classic novels by women, visible only to women in the know. Sybille Bedford, for example, in Jigsaw, went for broke: youthful yearnings, tricky older women, wide-legged trousers: the works. And as for that Daphne du Maurier … filth, pure and simple. But now, thanks to Sarah Waters and Ali Smith particularly, there’s a sense that lesbians count in fiction, just as much as gay men do.

Contemporary British fiction has become much, much more inclusive, so that now the archetypal contemporary British character isn’t a mild-mannered parson in a rural village but someone who is Bengali, or extremely short, or Welsh, or all three. Most of the characters in When We Were Bad are Jewish and there are at least three lesbians – 20 years ago I would be considered niche; now I’m proudly mainstream.

AE: What appeals to you about writing in this genre?

CM: As a reader I look for novels which involve me in the characters’ dilemmas and crises – does she love her? Will she leave him? – so that I forget that I’m on the train. As a writer I try and do the same for my readers; so my books aren’t thrillers, where plot is all (sometimes at the expense of character), and they’re not wistful soppy descriptions of dust-motes falling in beams of light – they’re character with plot. Which is like life, isn’t it?

AE: What do you look for on the first page of a book that tells you whether you’ll finish the book?

CM: Wit, or darkness, or excitement – something that grips or move me, so that nothing matters but the world between the covers. I’ve been addicted to that since I was tiny … now I’m much, much bigger and the thrill hasn’t gone.

AE: Do you have any suggestions for women aspiring to write?

CM: Write. That’s all there is to it – stop worrying about what you think you should write and just stick your pen in the vein.

AE: Do you plan to write in other genres?

CM: Westerns. Just kidding.

AE: Name a favorite author outside your genre and explain why you appreciate their work.

CM: Alison Bechdel. I can’t draw a stick person, let alone complex, subtle, funny, brilliantly observed portraits of ordinary life, while simultaneously writing characterization and plot as good as the best novelists. Dykes to Watch Out For is a work of genius; most other writers are not worthy to turn its pages.

AE: Which contemporary British novel do you most wish you had written?

CM: Affinity. It’s a masterpiece.

AE: Tell us one of your favorite literary quotes.

CM: “And then a very long shadow falls across the golden floor and across me and across my laughter … And then I look up. And I see the King.”

This is from Rose Tremain’s Restoration and I love it for two reasons. First, because it’s a heart-stoppingly romantic moment, and second, because it reminds me what fiction can do. The narrator is an apparently heterosexual male courtier in 17th-century England, but his love for the king transcends everything; you’d have to read the novel to understand why this moment moves me so much, but it’s now that we realize how much he longs for something, anything, from this man.

Next page: Karin Kallmaker on romance

Karin Kallmaker’s latest novel, The Kiss That Counted, will be published in June. The out author has dozens of other novels in print, many translated into foreign editions, and Kallmaker recently joined her publisher, Bella Books, as editorial director, giving her the opportunity to mentor a new generation of writers.

AfterEllen.com: Do you recall the first lesbian romance novel that had a lasting impact on you?

Karin Kallmaker: Curious Wine. There was nothing like it before and nothing like it since. I read it twice in one weekend, and cried through the entire second reading. It was validating, inspiring … and remains so.

AE: How have romance novels developed or changed in recent years, especially in terms of portrayals of lesbians and bisexuals?

KK: The coming out story per se is almost cliché now, but “coming-into-self” themes with the issues around choosing to live openly as a queer person, balancing home, family, work and callings remains a central romance character arc, supported by an entertaining, compelling story.

AE: What are the elements you look for in a good romance novel? How do you decide if a particular book is worth finishing?

KK: I’m so caught in the dilemmas and issues of the characters that I can’t wait to see how they solve them. If I respect the characters and believe they have earned happiness and passion, I will savor every last word on their journey.

Engaging stories of how two women create happiness, against all odds, never grow old to me. We work, love, laugh and deal with life 24/7, and romance novels take our “ordinary” existence and make it extraordinary. Which, if you think about it, love is extraordinary, whenever it occurs.

AE: Why do you write romance novels?

KK: Romance novels are the only genre where the everyday survival issues and matters of the heart are given the attention and focus they really take in our lives. A romance heroine can be larger-than-life, but the issues of life and heart she faces connect with readers like nothing else does. A reader can lose herself in a romance novel for the entertainment and finish it thinking, “She found love and respect in her life – so can I.”

AE: You’ve written more than two dozen novels. How do you keep your topics and characters fresh?

KK: The only way I can describe it is casting a big net, keeping my eyes wide open, looking for something that inspires. It can be a phrase, or a song, or a situation. While I might look at how movies and television are presenting women and lesbians, I search for themes in the lives of real women – like body image, family, financial risks, self-esteem, respect, safety, etc. Some themes, like respect, are so central to our lives that a writer can approach it dozens of different ways and write a different story every time.

AE: Recommend three or more romance novels that relate to a single subject of personal interest or expertise.

KK: Five Music as the Food of Love romances:

Different Dress, Lori Lake

When Love Finds a Home, Megan Carter

Gossamer Axe, Gael Baudino

Love’s Melody Lost, Radclyffe

Maybe Next Time, Karin Kallmaker (if I may be so bold)

Tomorrow, in part two, we’ll present interviews with Sarah Waters on historical fiction, Shamim Sarif on international fiction, Val McDermid on mysteries, Kelley Eskridge on science fiction, Lillian Faderman on nonfiction, and Rebecca Walker on memoirs.

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