WOMEN AMONG US: TERRY GALLOWAY

Terry L. Galloway is a deaf writer (poetry, essays, memoir, and plays), director, dramaturg, and performance artist who has an international reputation for scandalous humor combined with incisive insight. Her latest memoir, Mean Little Deaf Queer, has been described as "Running with Scissors meets The Liar's Club" and has just been published by Beacon Press. At this moment Terry is in London doing readings, but will soon return to the U.S. to continue her book tour in many cities.

She's the founder of Actual Lives theater troupe (for disabled adults), cofounder of the Mickee Faust Alternative Performance Club in Tallahassee, Florida, one of the founders of Esther's Follies in Austin, Texas, and a celebrated alumnus of Shakespeare at Winedale. From cabaret to the Bard, she's sunk her enthusiastic teeth into every aspect of theatrical expression and wrestled it into new life. I once saw her perform Allan Ginsberg's "Howl" dressed as a dog, and she had us alternatively convulsing with laughter and weeping from the sudden revealed meaning in Ginsberg's lines.


She was born in 1950 to military parents stationed in Germany. Her mother was treated with experimental antibiotics during her pregnancy with Terry, resulting in Terry being born with profound hearing impairment, some visual deficit, and other fetal nervous system damage. Medical mishap was followed by cultural suppression, as Terry was kept from learning sign language because the thinking of the times was that ASL was not a "real language" and lip-reading offered children a chance to be "normal". We now know this choice can rob a baby of any ability to develop language at all.

This calamity is exactly what happened to my Uncle Joseph, who was removed from my grandparents when he was a toddler and sent to the Texas State School because he had begun acting out in rage at his inability to communicate with others. He and the other children there developed their own pidgin form of sign language, a desperate attempt to break their isolation. Joseph was taught a rudimentary trade (shoe repair), married another girl from the school, and never learned ASL or English. He was estranged from most of the family except my mother and father, who made any effort it took to stay in touch with him and converse across the vicious barrier imposed on him by stupid theorists and administrators.

Terry Galloway's middle name should be overcompensation, because she not only became brilliant in the written and oral use of English, she went into theater. But she is no Johnny Belinda, no nice-girl-making-good. She is full-throttle Falstaff with an education and dyke smarts. And to tell you the whole of how I know this, I'll have to tell you something about myself as well.

On July 25, 2000, I had my left knee replaced. I had a great job, savings and sick time set aside, lots of friends to help me, and a good sports medicine surgeon. I made what I believed was an informed decision. I expected to be out of the hospital and into the rehab unit in a couple of days, home five days after that, walking again more or less normally in six weeks.

But a perfect storm of complications nearly killed me, at first outright and then by degrees. I had a period of anoxia during the surgery that went unnoticed. When I came out of anesthesia, I was on a morphine drip that everyone assumed was responsible for my altered mental state. I was not sure where I was, what was happening around me, or sometimes who were people I know have known well. My kidneys failed, a rare side effect to the anticlotting drug I was on left me unable to eat or drink, and I began having a period again despite having reached menopause. Mostly, though, I could not tell anyone what was going on inside my head. My ability to connect my thoughts to language had been hammered. And nobody noticed.

Well, one nurse did. But the doctors argued it was the morphine, and everybody treated me like I was being overemotional when I tried to get past the roadblock in my neurons.

I hope you never know the kind of terror I felt. I hope nobody ever does.

My third night in the hospital, I was physically abused by the overworked nurse on duty. When the evidence was discovered on my body the following afternoon by another nurse, she called in a coworker and they flat out stated to each other what had occurred, but they didn't document it or tell anyone else, just dressed the wound and told me I wouldn't be left in the care of that nurse again. I began refusing to cooperate with anyone, which got me in more trouble. The physical therapist trying to get me walking up and down the monstrously unfamiliar hallway actually screamed at me that I was going to wind up in a wheelchair and die if I didn't follow her instructions. Finally they shipped me to rehab, several days late, and I decided to work my ass off, get out of there and to safety -- anywhere else felt like safety.

But home turned out to be just as strange and frightening, because of my continuing inability to communicate. I had an 18 inch wound in my leg closed with staples. I couldn't wipe myself, I couldn't hear the phone ring, I couldn't write my name, I couldn't read, and a lot of TV sounded like it wasn't in English. My insurance didn't cover in-home care except for a daily 20 minute visit by a nurse or a PT, so one of my friends came once a day to make me a meal, help me clean up, and do a few essentials. Otherwise I was alone. People were calling me but I couldn't hear the phone and thus was not answering.

Mostly I slept, because when I was asleep, I wasn't terrified.

Three days after I was discharged, I returned to my surgeon's office to have my staples removed. Here's a tip: If you are not an athlete, don't choose a sports medicine specialist as your surgeon. They will not have a realistic set of expectations for you. And they're not likely to be what you'd call empathetic. A friend drove me to the office visit and stayed in the room with me while I got x-rayed, but looked away when the doc pulled out my staples. It didn't hurt, so I did watch. And thus I witnessed eight inches of my wound gradually reopening before my eyes, my skin parting in slow motion to a depth of two inches. The surgeon said "Uh-oh" and left the room. After half a minute, so did my friend. It was the doctor's assistant who explained I had a skin condition called dehiscence, which means wounds tend to not stay closed. Since I'd never had surgery before, we were just finding out about it.

I asked him how much longer I'd be in the hospital. He explained, kindly, that this was not considered enough of a problem to require hospitalization. Instead, I'd be bandaged and sent home. The wound would heal from the inside out -- they call it healing by secondary intention, and if you think I haven't tried to write a poem with that fabulously symbolic phrase in it, you don't know me very well. It would take months, and alter my physical therapy program. He added, as an afterthought, that the risk of infection was now very high, so I'd have to go to see the wound care nurse on my way home.

I was given a wheelchair and sent away. Getting in and out of the chair, the car, had now become even more problematic. My friend coped with it silently, tensely. When she wheeled me into the wound care room, I looked into the face of the physical therapist who had screamed at me in the hospital. We both froze.

I was able, by that time, to articulate in a vague what was going on with me, though mostly I still thought it was a reaction to the morphine. To the PT's credit, she apologized for her behavior and turned out to give me a lot of information I needed. Wound care is a euphemism for teaching you how to take care of your own wound when you're not in the hospital. I'll spare you the details. Let's just say I learned to do things I never would have believed I could. She packed up supplies, wished me luck, and I went back home, where my friend got me to my bed and rushed away because she was late for something.

Two days after that, I called another friend, Mack. She told me she'd been hired to videotape a theater project that was being taught by Terry Galloway. I knew about Terry Galloway, had attended every performance of her in Austin for years, some of them several times. I adored her work. Mack said the new project was called Actual Lives: A group of adults with various disabilities met every day for a week, learning theater and writing an individual performance piece about their life, with Terry's hands-on training. On the seventh day, they would perform their work for the public on stage. Mack said she could maybe get me into the group, but I'd have to go that night.

I told her I needed her to come and get me. She crabbed about it -- I lived at the opposite end of Austin from where she was and where the group was meeting. Finally she said I'd have to be ready and waiting on her. I agreed. I got my wheelchair out the front door and sat on my patio half an hour before she pulled up.

I couldn't tell if Terry recognized me from my many attendances at her plays -- I was too overwhelmed by being out of anything close to familiar, with all the clamor of that particular environment, and with feeling like maybe I wasn't a "real" disabled person. I hadn't eaten dinner, either. In the group were two blind women and two people with TBI. Terry was deaf but not a signer, so everything anyone said had to be repeated to her by someone whose lips she could read, plus all action had to be conveyed to the blind women by a visual interpreter. This simultaneous, exhausting translation was hard on the frail and those with cognitive hits on their attention span. There was more than one meltdown that night. But Terry kept pushing each of us, refusing to treat us with pity or keep a distance. She was in our faces -- literally, if she could read our lips -- assuming if we had shown up for this, we had something to say and she was going to make damned well sure we did it artistically, honestly, and with respect for our audience. We were not going to be "see how the poor crips kinda do a play", not on her watch.

I don't remember saying anything that first night with Actual Lives. I know for certain I didn't tell any of them what I was actually contending with. Mostly I remember watching, still in terror but there was a glimmer of hope on the horizon. At the end of the evening, Terry told us we had to go home and write a paragraph on something, I can't remember what the assignment was. I wheeled over to her and, eventually, got across to her that I couldn't write yet.

"Yes you can" she shouted at me. She didn't mean to shout, that much I understood. "You can write two fucking lines, I don't care what it is. I expect you to bring it tomorrow." Then she put her hand on my shoulder and said "No excuses."

I had to wait on Mack because she was gathering up her gear. There were several people in line to use the only wheelchair accessible bathroom in that place, and I stayed at the end of the line because I didn't want anyone to offer to help, to see the huge bandage on my leg. By the time I got into the stall, I'd pissed myself. Mack found a plastic bag in the back of her car and put it on her seat before I got in. Once at home, I told her I could deal with cleaning myself up and she left.

Eventually, I walkered to my computer and turned it on, the first time since I'd been home. Thank god I had the password written out on a piece of paper next to the monitor. It took me 15 minutes to get a fresh document opened, sitting there in front of me. It was another two hours before, drenched in sweat, I'd managed to type out three sentences. It was extremely bad writing, not quite making sense and certainly not what I wanted to say. But it was enough. I printed it out and went to bed.

I honestly believe Actual Lives saved me. Mostly, it was Terry Galloway. She got to know me, each of us, so she could coax, lead, or hector us into doing the utmost of which we were capable. Over the next couple of years, I lost my job, my savings, most of my friends, and any financial security I'd had. The cat I lived for, my little brother, two of my oldest friends, and my beloved aunts died. I became absolutely a real crip, no doubt about it. But I met it all with courage and humor, instead of being mowed down, because Terry insisted (and modeled) that reality was what you made of it and art is the best transformative tool she knows.

(Terry Galloway with Rude Mechanicals Theater Group in Austin, Texas; photo by Kenny Braun.)

Early on, I tried to write about what happened to me in the hospital and rehab center. It was grim, desperate stuff. Terry was visibly affected by it, as she usually was by our stories. She weeps easily. She gives her heart away at a moment's notice. But one piece of writing she handed back to me, the account of a nightmarish night when I'd needed a tampon changed in the rehab unit and the staff who showed up had never used a tampon themselves. She told me to rewrite it as comedy. I can clearly remember that my immediate response, inside my head, was "Fuck you." Probably that showed on my face as well, because she leaned in to say, a little too loud, "It could be hysterical, if you give up wanting somebody to feel sorry for you."

I did rewrite it, over and over, until it became the second-best performance I ever created. It brought audiences to their knees, howling with laughter, and at the same time conveyed -- far more effectively than a straight approach would -- the intimate horror of that episode. Terry has recently staged it with her performance troupe in Tallahassee. If you want to read the final script, it's at the end of the post titled My Knees (Part Two -- Surgery and Rehab).

I trust Terry completely. She's never let me down. And from her shove back into writing, I went on to form my own writing group, to find other mentors, and to realize my voice as a writer.

In 2002, we both attended the first (and so far, only) Queer Disability Conference in San Francisco. We had rooms in the same dorm, on the same floor, and this incident happened repeatedly: I'd be in my dorm room when I'd hear a pounding on the door and Terry shouting "Maggie! Maggie! Are you in there?" I'd get painstakingly to my feet, lean on my quad cane and move slowly to the door. But once I got it open, I'd see Terry chugging impatiently down the hall toward her own room, her back to me. At which point I'd stupidly shout after her "Terry! Hey, Terry!" Then I'd smack my head, remembering she's DEAF, you dummy.

That itself would make a hilarious little vignette on stage, I think.

In the late 1990s, before Terry became a friend and mentor, I started a group studying the herstory of lesbian activism in Austin during the 1970s. Eventually I made a documentary about this era, interviewing many women about that period in their lives. One of the names which always came up was that of Terry Galloway, who despite being powerful and socially active appears to have made no enemies along the way. Extremely rare for dykes bent on revolution. I was highly entertained when two different women that I interviewed confided in me, off camera, that they were proud of having been "the woman who brought out Terry Galloway". I was even more entertained years later when I told Terry about it, and she snorted in reply "Neither one of them was my first lover!"

Terry's biography at Beacon Press reads:

Terry Galloway is a deaf, queer writer and performer, who tours her one-woman shows as a cheap way of seeing the world. She has performed her solo shows "Out All Night and Lost My Shoes" and "Lardo Weeping," in venues ranging from the American Place theater in New York to the Zap Club in Brighton, England. In Austin, Texas she gained a reputation for playing comic male roles as a student and Research Associate for the University of Texas' alternative Summer Theater Festival, Shakespeare at Winedale.

She's also known as one of the founding members of Austin's wildly popular 6th street cabaret Esther's Follies and as the founder of Actual Lives, a writing and performance workshop for adults with and without disabilities. In Tallahassee, Florida she is the Head Cheese of the Mickee Faust Academy for the REALLY Dramatic Arts and the co-founder of the Mickee Faust Club, a performance group responsible for the award-winning video parodies, "Annie Dearest, The Real Miracle Worker, " featuring lots and lots of wah-wah, and "The Scary Lewis Yell-a-thon," featuring a Jerry Lewis look-alike and a bevy of inspirational cripples. She writes as well as performs and you can find her articles, monologues, poems and performances texts in, among other publications, Sleepaway: Writings on Summer Camp, Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater, Out of Character- Rants, Raves and Monologues from Today's Top Performance Artists, Plays from the Women's Project, Texas Monthly Magazine, Austin Chronicle, American Voice, The Dolphin Reader, and numerous anthologies about queerness, deafness, disability, theater, and Elvis.

She has been a Visiting Artist at the California Institute of the Arts, Florida State University, and the University of Texas at Austin. She's won a variety of awards including an NEA, a J. Frank Dobie Fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters, grants from the Texas Commission of the Arts and the Florida Divisions of Cultural Affairs, five Corporation for Public Broadcasting Awards, three Prindi National Public Radio Commentary Awards, and a Best Swimmer Award from the Lions Camp for Crippled Children.

She splits her time between Austin Texas, and Tallahassee, Florida where she lives with her long-time love Donna Marie Nudd, a professor at Florida State University, and their cat Tweety.

Donna Marie Nudd and Terry Galloway, Dobie Paisano Ranch outside Austin, Texas, March 2008, photo ©Marsha Miller, University of Texas at Austin.

SELECTED WORK BY TERRY GALLOWAY:
Mean Little Deaf Queer, Beacon Press, 2009.

Out All Night and Lost My Shoes, play edited by Barbara Hamby, Tallahassee: Apalachee, l993.

In The House Of The Moles, unpublished play.

Lardo Weeding, unpublished play.

Deaf As A Post/Tough as Nails, performance at Queer Disability Conference, San Francisco, June 2002.

Out All Night And Lost My Shoes (solo amalgam performance, includes "Mr. Handchops"), performance at Queer Disability Conference, San Francisco, June 2002.

"Heart of a Dog" In The Women’s Project 2, edited by Julia Miles. New York: Performing Arts Journal, l984.

“Taken: The Philosophically Sexy Transformations Engendered in a Woman by Playing Male Roles in Shakespeare", Text and Performance Quarterly 17.1 (1997): 94-100.

What We Carried Away from Winedale, article in the Austin Chronicle, 23 July 2004

Go to the website for her book at Mean Little Deaf Queer , scroll down the page to the Contents and click on "The Performance of Drowning" to hear an MP3 of Terry reading her essay about winning a swimming award at the Lions Camp for Crippled Children. Highly recommended.

One of Terry Galloway's screenplays and directorial efforts is the short Annie Dearest, by produced by Faust Films and Diane Wilkins. This is a video parody of the classic film The Miracle Worker, which originally starred Patty Duke as deaf/blind Helen Keller and Anne Bancroft as Anne Sullivan, Helen's mentor and tormentor. Disability World heralded Annie Dearest as one of the 25 most outstanding disability films in the last five years. This reveals Terry Galloway's trenchant humor at its best and limns her philosophy of refusing to be the inspirational sort of "good cripple". Co-creator Donna Nudd also stars in the video as "Annie Dearest".


ARTICLES ABOUT TERRY GALLOWAY:
Illuminating essay by Donna Marie Nudd, Terry's partner, titled Feminists As Invisible Dramaturgs: A Case Study of Terry Galloway's Lardo Weeping.

Two Generations, One Art by Robert Faires in the Austin Chronicle, 25 February 2000

QUOTES BY TERRY GALLOWAY:
“Deafness has left me acutely aware of both the duplicity that language is capable of and the many expressions the body cannot hide.”

"Reality which so often intimidates us is exposed as just another fiction. Ours for the rewriting." -- from "Deaf as a Post/Tough as Nails" performed for Queer Disability Conference, San Francisco, California 2002

QUOTES ABOUT TERRY GALLOWAY:
"This is not your mother's triumph-of-the-human-spirit memoir. Yes, Terry Galloway is resilient. But she's also caustic, depraved, utterly disinhibited, and somehow sweetly bubbly, a beguiling raconteuse who periodically leaps onto the dinner table and stabs you with her fork. Her story will fascinate, it will hurt, and you will like it." -- Alison Bechdel, author of FUN HOME

“This is a damn fine piece of work which is unbelievably powerful. This story is true and passionate and fearless and funny as hell when it is not heartbreaking. I expect this book to charm the hell out of great numbers of people, piss off a few, and give hope to many more...” -- Dorothy Allison

Donna Marie Nudd and Terry Galloway, Dobie Paisano Ranch outside Austin, Texas, March 2008, photo ©Marsha Miller, University of Texas at Austin.

[Cross-posted at Group News Blog.]

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WOMEN AMONG US: ACHY OBEJAS

(Achy Obejas, photo courtesy of Depauw University)

Achy Obejas is a brilliant, innovative, lyrical novelist and poet whose work is a motherlode of synthesis. She uses her solid background in journalism to report on culture, but with a poet's sensibility, using a combination of brevity and metaphor to animate across borders.

She was born in Cuba in 1956 and brought to the U.S. by her parents after the Cuban revolution at age six. She grew up in Michigan City, Indiana, with her parents expecting to eventually return to Cuba. Instead, in 1979 Achy moved to Chicago, where she has lived as an out dyke who writes with authority and grace on embracing multiple identities.


The biography up at her website states:

Achy's poetry and fiction have been published in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Indiana Review, Story, La Gaceta de Cuba, Habana Elegante, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Best of Helicon Nine, Another Chicago Magazine, Abraxas, Antigonish Review, Bilingual Review, Conditions, Ikon, Interstate, Phoebe/George Mason University Review, Rambunctious Review, Revista Chicano-Riqueña, Sing Heavenly Muse!, Sinister Wisdom, Strong Coffee, Third Woman, and many others.

An award-winning journalist, she worked for more than ten years for the Chicago Tribune writing and reporting about arts and culture. Among literally thousands of stories, she helped cover Pope John Paul II's historic 1998 visit to Cuba, the arrival of Al-Queda prisoners in Guantánamo, the Versace murder, and the AIDS epidemic.

She writes regularly about Latin music for the Washington Post and about books for In These Times.

Her articles have appeared in the Village Voice, Vogue, Playboy, Los Angeles Times, MS, Weep, Nerve.com, Latina, Latin Girl, Poz en Español, The Nation, Out, Chicago Reader, The Advocate, Girlfriends, Windy City Times, High Performance, New City, Chicago Reporter, The Catalyst, Chicago, Chicago Sun-Times, Hispanic, La Raza, Hispanic Link (a bilingual national syndication service), and many others.

Achy's translation projects have included Maria Torres Piers' By Heart (Temple University Press); catalogue text for "Passionately Cuban," an art exhibition at the University of Albany, Albany, New York; catalogue text for the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria; Picturing Cuba (University of New Mexico Press, 2002) by E. Wright Ledbetter; and articles for the Chicago Tribune. She was recently contracted by the family of the late Cuban poet laureate Nicolás Guillén to produce a new translation of his work, including the classic "Motivos de Son" (the only authorized English version was previously translated by Langston Hughes in 1948).

During her career, Achy has received a Pulitzer for a Tribune team investigation, the Studs Terkel Journalism Prize, several Peter Lisagor journalism honors, two Lambda Literary awards, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, and residencies at Yaddo, Ragdale and the Virginia Center for the Arts, among other honors.

Her work has been translated into Spanish, German, Hungarian and Farsi. She has lectured and read her work in the U.S., Cuba, Mexico, Spain, Argentina and Australia, and has served as the Springer Writer-in-Residence at the University of Chicago and the Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Hawai'i.

Achy Obejas is currently the Sor Juana Visiting Writer at DePauw University in Chicago.

Watch Achy Obejas read from her current novel Ruins at Galeria De La Raza in San Francisco on 14 January 2009:


QUOTES FROM ACHY OBEJAS:

“I like to think that a poem sort of floats above the banalities of things like calendars and clocks. And I like that space that poetry puts you in—where all logic is suspended.”

Not in Cars

dark danger in the shadows of the city city city driving
by the danger darkness urban building and the men men
that serve as girders beams the backbone of the danger
men in windows stories high indiscriminately lurching from
the speeding cars the freeway thieves that drop their
compliments their vile demands commands from rusting
cars on cracking crosstown roads twisting twisted shadows
grotesque mouths that vomit words like green white bullets
to the womyn on the sidewalks in the buildings not in cars

~~ from Sinister Wisdom #16, 1981

"It's just that sometimes other lives lived right alongside mine interrupt, barge in on my senses, and I no longer know if I really lived through an experience or just heard about it so many times, or so convincingly, that I believed it for myself--became the lens through which it was captured, retold and reshaped." ~~ from Memory Mambo

Llorona

cry sorrow sorrow
coming with your dried snakes charm
charming the crazed and
the innocent with your lyrical
lunacy
mystical
tales of the moon
you claim immortality
you
you think you'll find me there
docile
bewildered
the lost child torn from
you by demons that swirl and
burn amidst the golden
brown hair of your devil devil
child
oh cry sorrow with
your spells and the magic no
one doubts you own
the power that swallows everyone's
fantasies
you claim life forever
using scars for tears and a
noise noise that shakes
reverberates
beating all the passion
with a passion
the black sweet bruises and dark systems
wanting to wring them out of
me out of you
you claim life forever
again and again thinking
I'll be there steady ready
to take up the fight
of mother and daughter divided
unsatisfied forever
antagonistic cry sorrow
let your ovary
throb from the pain of my absence
I am the daughter the children
shredded castrated decapitated
in the arid desert
the blood red flames in your eyes
which serve as blinders
to keep you from seeing what
you wish not to see

take a white woman to lie
with you
clean smooth as
enamel
the veins plainly visible
through vinyl skin
rest your head on what
you claim so close to perfection
and take repose
rest rest
but when when all seems finally
quiet
there's a beat beat
a beat in your head
a pain in your abdomen

y
siempre
siempre por las
noches
there's that fearful wailing

~~from Sinister Wisdom #16, 1981

LINKS TO ACHY OBEJAS:

Achy Obejas website
Her MySpace page
Bio at Voices from the Gaps
Interview with Achy Obejas about Days of Awe at the National Yiddish Book Center

BOOKS BY ACHY OBEJAS:

Ruins, 2009, Akashic Books, ISBN-10 : 1933354690
This Is What Happened In Our Other Life (Body Language), 2007, Midsummer Nights Press, ISBN-10 : 0979420822
Days of Awe, 2001, Ballantine, ISBN-10 : 034543921X
Memory Mambo, 1996, Cleis Press, ISBN-10 : 1573440175
We came all the way from Cuba so you could dress like this?, 1994, Cleis Press, ISBN-10 : 093941693X

ONLINE WRITINGS AVAILABLE (Available at her website via Other Writings)

"My Own Private Cuba", an account by Obejas -- in both English and Spanish -- of her most recent visit to Cuba, published in The Chicago Tribune, 19 January 2002

"The End Of The Affair", an article by Obejas about Cuba and Alma Guillermoprieto's memoir Dancing with Cuba, published in The Nation on 15 March 2004

"From Havana With Love", an article by Obejas on how "A new generation faces Cuba's dark reality", published in The Village Voice in February 2001


[Cross-posted at Group News Blog.]

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WOMEN AMONG US: DOROTHY ALLISON

I cannot pretend to any objectivity about Dorothy Allison. In 1993 I was given a gift certificate to Book People here in Austin and went shopping in that store for the first time -- I usually did all my book buying at BookWoman, our feminist bookstore. I purchased Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison and two books by Sarah Schulman, After Delores and Empathy. I read them all, one after another, and, as they say, my world split open.


I first began writing at age nine, urged into collaborating on a short story with a girl whom I loved passionately, desperately. After we moved away from the town where she lived, I continued writing short stories but also, at the end of that summer, wrote my first poem. It is linked temporally with the point at which I discovered there was a word for who I was: Lesbian. I shared that first poem with my mother, who was overwhelmed by our family circumstances and offered only a hurried criticism. After that, I did not tell anyone about my poems for another four years. I didn't share my sexual preference for another year beyond that.

But both identities are core to me, inextricable from Who I Am. During the 1970s and 1980s, I thought of myself as a writer as much as I called myself a dyke, though there were times when I didn't write much, if at all. Occasionally I was published. Mostly I was focused on activism, on trying to save the world.

I felt powerful barriers to being/becoming a writer. I could not imagine ever being paid for what I wanted to write, because my voice and my story were not valued by the world at large. It wasn't just the lesbian aspect, although that was certainly a clear gulf at that point in our culture -- the only people who cared about the lives of dykes were other dykes. Beyond that, however, I had been raised poor and had rejected upward mobility. My repudiation of shame made me suspect, even (and sometimes especially) among the working class. In addition, I had terrible secrets about sex and violence. I had broken silence on these secrets, but how could that become literature?

My friend Holly and I sometimes talked about what she called "survivor art", which she defined as artistic expression that went beyond simply naming what had been done to us as children, beyond confession. She envisioned it as reclaiming a whole girlhood, envisioning and creating (through writing, in my case) a reality where scars no longer acted as boundaries. It was an idea I found compelling.

And when I read Bastard Out of Carolina, I discovered Dorothy Allison had made the idea manifest. She told an entire story, all the pieces that my own contained, in a way which every reader understood. It was a finalist for the National Book Award, ferchristsake. This alone was concrete proof that my reality was no longer relegated to the shadows.

Likewise, Sarah Schulman wrote about a lesbian existence I comprehended intimately, but she did not offer a great deal of explanation: no back and fill to make it "easy" for a non-native reader. Again, her books were selling like hotcakes. If I didn't have to apologize, or translate, or temper my own words, then I too could write whatever I wanted. These women had just handed me an E-ticket to one of my core identities.

I had read occasional essays or poems by Dorothy Allison in women's publications. Now I went on a feeding frenzy, consuming The Women Who Hate Me and Trash in a gulp. Every time a new book appeared by her -- Skin, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure, Cavedweller -- I was first in line to buy and read them. In particular, her essay A Question of Class gave me much of the bedrock I now occupy in understanding and talking about classism.

She broke the trail I now follow. Still, I didn't take the step to becoming a Writer. Not yet.

Then in July 1999, after my left knee had decided to retire from my body but before I replaced it with titanium and plastic, I read that Dorothy Allison was teaching a workshop on writing memoir at a literary arts nonprofit called Gemini Ink in San Antonio. I enlisted the help of friends to get there and enrolled. I was terrified that morning of the workshop, and almost backed out. Once I was there, however, Dorothy looked across the room at me and grinned. By the end of the day, she gave me her phone number, the phone number of her agent, and said when I was ready, to call her.

I learned worlds that day about exactly what I needed to do. She was candid and generous. I can still hear her voice in my head saying certain things. Like "You get to tell your story, exactly how you want to tell it. Nobody else can tell your story, don't edit it for anybody." That writing is catharsis, if done right, but that's not why you should write. That she doesn't "do" therapy -- that's what friends are for. That to gear up for a hard patch of writing, she'll down a 2 liter bottle of Coke (me, too, my drug of choice). That nobody except Stephen King and Danielle Steel are earning a living strictly from what they write, every other writer either has a teaching gig, sells screenplays and movie rights, or has somebody to support them while they pursue their art.

When my friend and I got to her car afterward, my friend pounded on the dash and yelled "You got her phone number! She's going to make sure you get published, you wait and see." But I knew I was only just beginning.

Since then, I've had to contend with increasing disability, a lost year due to the cognitive injury during my surgery, growing poverty and isolation, and much, much death and loss. However, I've never stopped heading toward the next step in becoming a writer. Others stepped in to mentor me (Sharon Bridgforth, Terry Galloway), and I finally got the writing group of my dreams. I crossed the border and became the writer I was meant to be. Now I'm almost done with my novel, and eventually, when I have product in hand, I'll be calling Dorothy. I owe so much to her.

So do we all, in various ways.

She was born to an unmarried, dirt-poor 15-year-old girl in South Carolina, raised in poverty and abuse but also with love and rich Southern family culture. Lesbian-feminism saved her, as it saved me (although she was East Coast during those critical years and I was West Coast, which makes a difference). She's been partnered with Alix Layton for a couple of decades, and they have a teenaged son, Wolf Michael. She travels around lecturing when she isn't writing. She gives her energy away as much as she can -- more than she should, probably. She wears her hair long, is blind in one eye, and lives now in Northern California, the promised land for her. She looks damned good on a motorbike. Her recipe for red velvet cake is the best ever.

Read her as if she holds the key to emancipation, because in fact I think she does.

QUOTES BY DOROTHY ALLISON:

"I grew up poor, hated, the victim of physical, emotional, and sexual violence, and I know that suffering does not ennoble. It destroys." -- from A Question of Class

"I do not write about nice people. I am not nice people." -- from Skin: Talking About Sex, Class And Literature

“Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.” -- O Magazine, January 2004

"There was a myth of the poor in this country, but it did not include us. no matter how hard I tried to squeeze us in. There was an idea of the good poor—hard-working, ragged but clean, and intrinsically honorable. I understood that we were the bad poor: men who drank and couldn't keep a job; women, invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours and bearing too many children; and children with runny noses, watery eyes, and the wrong attitudes." -- from A Question of Class

Re the early feminist movement: "It was like opening your eyes under water. It hurt, but suddenly everything that had been dark and mysterious became visible and open to change."

“Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form.”

“Independent presses and bookstores give access to literature specific to a place. Readers can find stories they need.”

“I wear my skin only as thin as I have to, armor myself only as much as seems absolutely necessary. I try to live naked in the world, unashamed even under attack, unafraid even though I know how much there is to fear.” – from Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature

"Entitlement … is a matter of feeling like we rather than they … Why are you so afraid? my lovers and friends have asked me the many times I have suddenly seemed a stranger, someone who would not speak to them, would not do the things they believed I should do, simple things like applying for a job, or a grant, or some award they were sure I could acquire easily. Entitlement, I have told them, is a matter of feeling like we rather than they." -- from A Question of Class

“It’s an illusion that writers have a lot of choice about what they write. Your stories are your stories. They’re the only ones you can really tell, and if you try telling ones the world would like you tell, you’ll do it badly.” – Curve Magazine 2001

“Feminism gave me a vision of the world totally different from everything I had ever assumed or hoped. The concept of a feminist literature offered the possibility of pride in my sexuality.”

“I’m completely aware that people would like me to write a love story. It’s just that when I write a love story you probably are not goin’ to be able to tell. I don’t believe in romance in that sense. I actually believe romance is almost as much work as raising children.” – Curve Magazine 2001

"The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal. It is a belief that dominates this culture." -- from A Question of Class

“I don’t want to simplify when I write. I want people there with their warts on. I want you to love them even when you hate them.” - from "Dorothy Allison: Telling Tales, Telling Truths", essay by Kate Brandt in Happy Endings: Lesbian writers talk about their lives and their work

“I write who I can write—people I can understand. I can understand deeply wounded, hidden kinds of girls.” – Curve Magazine 2001

“There are only supposed to be certain people who are worth the trouble and you basically have to be middle class or exceptional in some way, really beautiful or really smart or be kissed by Jesus for god’s sake—the rest of us, we’re background noise and our stories aren’t important. And I just don’t believe that. I think the working class is the story of this country. The rich and the upper class have been riding on our asses for hundreds of years, and I don’t want to see us made over into a story that glorifies them. Our stories are glory enough.” – Curve Magazine 2001

“We are the ones they make fiction of – we gay and disenfranchised and female – and we have the right to demand our full, nasty, complicated lives.”

BOOKS BY DOROTHY ALLISON:

The Women Who Hate Me (poetry), 1983 by Firebrand Books, ISBN-10 : 0932379982

Trash (short stories), 1988 Plume Books, ISBN-10 : 0452283515 -- Winner of Lambda literary awards as best lesbian small press book and best lesbian fiction

Bastard Out of Carolina(novel), 1992 by Plume Books, ISBN-10 : 0452269571 – National Book Award finalist, Ferro Grumley & Bay Area Book Reviewers Awards, translated into more than a dozen languages and published in more than a dozen countries; in 1995, it was made into a movie directed by Angelica Huston and premiered on Showtime

Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature (essay collection), 1994 by Firebrand Books, ISBN 1-56341-044-3 – Gay & Lesbian Book Award, American Library Association

Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (memoir), 1996 by Plume Books, ISBN-10 : 0452273404 – named notable book of the year by New York Times Book Review

Cavedweller (novel), 1998 by Plume Books, ISBN-10 : 0452279 – Lambda literary award for fiction

She Who (forthcoming from Penguin Putnam)

LINKS:

Dorothy Allison's website

A Question of Class (essay at History Is A Weapon)

FemBio biography of Dorothy Allison

Interview with Dorothy Allison as Zale Writer in Residence at Tulane

Interview with Dorothy Allison at Salon

Interview with Dorothy Allison at Identity Theory

(Maggie at Dorothy's writing workshop in July 1999, Gemini Ink, San Antonio, Texas; Maggie is upper right, Dorothy is to my right)

[Cross-posted at Group News Blog.]

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