New Media Tools for Queer Writers

Posted on May 12, 2012 by Cecilia Tan in Features, Opinion

If you haven’t been living on a desert island for the past decade or two, you know that GLBT literature has been under a lot of stress to adapt to the new media environment. Many publishers that were the bastions of queer culture in the 1970s and 80s have gone out of business. While we do have some significant additions (most notably Bold Strokes Books and Lethe Press), the list of venerable publishers who have folded is long. (more…)

Let the Wild Rumpus Start: The Power of Maurice Sendak

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Sassafras Lowrey in Features, Opinion

Yesterday morning, as the New York Times published their obituary of one of the world’s most beloved illustrators, Maurice Sendak, I watched the mourning spread across the queer Internet. His quotes came up in Facebook statuses, user pictures changed to picture books, twitter users tweeted links to YouTube interviews , as slowly, collectively, we grappled with the realization there would never again be a new Maurice Sendak book. All day his name has come up in nearly every conversation, and I’ve struggled to put into words the impact of his work on my life. I still can’t describe how lonely it is here in the night kitchen, knowing that he’s gone. (more…)

A Leather Conversation with Sassafras Lowrey and Sinclair Sexsmith

Posted on April 24, 2012 by Edit Team in Features, Opinion

Sinclair Sexsmith runs the award-winning personal online writing project Sugarbutch Chronicles: The Gender, and Relationship Adventures of a Kinky Queer Butch Top. Sinclair has contributed to many anthologies, was the guest judge for Best Lesbian Erotica 2012 and is the editor of Say Please: Lesbian BDSM Erotica to be released this spring. Sassafras Lowrey is an international award winning queer author and artist. Sassafras edited the Kicked Out anthology which was a Lammy finalist and twice honored by the American Library Association. Hir first novel, Roving Pack will be released this autumn, and ze is currently editing Leather Ever After, an anthology of BDSM fairytale retellings. Lambda invited these two authors for whom kink is a key focus of their work, to have a conversation about queer leather writing, and their perspective and experience with the genre: (more…)

No Good Novels in 2011? For the First Time in 35 years, the Pulitzer Committee Declines Award for Fiction

Posted on April 17, 2012 by Victoria Brownworth in Features, Opinion

Once you’ve been nominated for a Pulitzer, you’re re-wired to anticipate that April day every year when the announcements are made. It’s crushing when you don’t win, yet it truly is an honour to be nominated. Ever-after it’s part of your resume, part of your persona.   (more…)

Reader Meet Author: Advice on Love, Life, and Living

Posted on April 2, 2012 by William Johnson in Features, Opinion

Do you have problems with your love life? Don’t get along with your in-laws? Are your co-workers irksome? All life’s problems can be answered through literature —or maybe at least by the people who create it. With that in mind, we here at The Lambda Literary Review have started our very own advice column called “Reader Meet Author.”  Think of the column as sort of a “Dear Abby” for the LGBTQ literary set. You can send “Reader Meet Author” questions for publication to ReaderMeetAuthor@lambdaliterary.org. (more…)

Literary Mixtape: Aspects of Myra, Reflected in Film (1935–45)

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Aaron Tilford in Features, Opinion

“The novel being dead, there is no point to writing made-up stories. Look at the French who will not and the Americans who cannot. Look at me who ought not, if only because I exist entirely outside the usual human experience…” — Myra Breckenridge

“…like so many would-be intellectuals back East Myra never actually read books, only books about books.” — Myron Breckenridge

Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckenridge (1968) is my favorite novel, LGBT or otherwise. And Myra is my favorite literary character, LGBT or otherwise. As I typed (already past tense) that first sentence I hesitated for a few reasons. I think Myra would detest being labeled LGBT, and I fear her wrath. And who am I to attempt this playlist portrait of the entity that is Myra Breckenridge (“…whom no man may posses except on [her] terms!”)? If she were to judge me, would I be found wanting? Must I also be destroyed for her to fulfill her mission? And also, for Myra Breckenridge to be your favorite book, you have to be, in some way, at least a little bit, evil. (more…)

Adrienne Rich: Send Something Back

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Susan Stinson in Features, Opinion

We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
Adrienne Rich, What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics

When I heard today that Adrienne Rich had died, I went to my disorganized shelves and started pulling out her books.  I found twelve of them, and I know that I’ve got more that I’m not putting my hands on.  Rich’s work has been an enormous force in my inner life ever since my older brother gave me a copy of her book Diving into the Wreck more than thirty years ago, when I was still in high school.  I have it open on the table beside me now.  It begins with an epigraph from George Eliot:  There is no private life which is not determined by a wider public life.   So, then, I’ll try again, stumbling, to say it:  since I was eighteen, the poetry and essays of Adrienne Rich have profoundly shaped how I experience myself and the world (false dichotomy, messy distinction) as a writer, as a lesbian, as a white U.S. citizen, as a person getting out of bed in the morning.

That last is literally true.  I’ve got a poster of Rich on the wall in my kitchen, covering the hole for the chimney of an old stove.  I took it off a door in an obscure corridor of a building at the University of Massachusetts when I was going back to my job after hearing her give a lecture called Arts of the Possible, later the name of a collection of her essays.  In that lecture, given in 1997 (Someone wrote “TODAY” in red magic marker on my poster), she said:

Over the past two decades or less, we have become a pyramidic society of the omnivorously acquisitive few, an insecure, dwindling middle class, and a multiplying number of ill-served, throwaway citizens and workers—finally, a society accused by the highest incarceration rate in the world.  We dangle over an enormous gap between national propaganda and the ways most people are actually living:  a cognitive and emotional dissonance, a kind of public breakdown, with symptoms along a spectrum from acute self-involvement to extreme anxiety to individual and group violence.

Her work was tough-minded, brave and brilliant.  Reading it, listening to her, I felt that she engaged the world with everything she had.  Her work never failed to engage me, and to challenge me to see more, admit more, to take some kind of action.  I know that I’m far from alone in this.  Her voice, her words have come to me, and come back to me, over and over at crucial moments of my life.

I keep touching the first books of hers I bought for myself:  The Dream of a Common Language  and A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far.  They have warm ivory-colored covers with textured paper.  As physical objects and as poetry, they are charged, for me, with a sense of discovery and desire, with my first conscious efforts to share erotic life with other women and to write.  Adrienne Rich and Michele Cliff were editors and publishers for two years of the lesbian feminist journal, Sinister Wisdom, which still exists today.  That journal published my first poem, not long after they moved on.   My friends and I sat in a circle in the living room of a rented house and read Rich’s essay, “Women and Honor:  Some Notes on Lying,” aloud to each other.   When I first tried to write about fatness and being a fat woman, a subject that would engage me for four books and hasn’t let go of me even now, I began with a quote from “Women and Honor”:

When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet.

When, on the cusp of another millennium, someone responded to one of my essays with a letter full of hatred that knocked me for a loop, friends helped me organize a Speak-Out Against Fat Hatred in response.  One of them sent an excerpt from Rich’s “Transcendental Etude” to rouse and comfort me.  A character quotes Adrienne Rich on page two of my most recent novel.  When I started to think about writing about Puritans, I reread Rich on the poet Ann Bradstreet.  When I started to think about writing about nineteenth century New England, I reread Rich on Emily Dickinson.  I just searched my computer for references for Rich, and was startled to see a quote from her in notes for a blog post that I was working on yesterday.  Her work is so much part of the air I breathe that I had forgotten it was there.

In the introduction to her book of essays, What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, Adrienne Rich wrote:

I knew—had long known—how poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.  And, in spite of conditions as large, it seemed to me that poetry in the United States had never been more various and rich in its promise and realized offerings.  But I had, more than I wanted to acknowledge, internalized the idea, so common in this country, so strange in most other places, that poetry is powerless, or that it can have nothing to do with the kinds of powers that organize us as a society, as communities within that society, as relationships within communities.  If asked, I would have said that I did not accept this idea.  Yet it haunted me.

Any time that I am ambitious enough to try – in poetry, fiction or essays–to restore numbed zones to feeling, I am drawing on Adrienne Rich.  I know that I have barely taken in the fact of her death, but one thing it means to me is that I have to try harder, to work in a more deep and committed way to do bring those tremendous shivers of truth into words.  If she’s not here to do it, those of us shaped by her work have to try.  When I’m afraid of something that’s happening in the world or overwhelmed by a knotty challenge in my work,  I often hear the voice of one of her poems, “Coast to Coast,” in my head.  Send some thing back.

If you can read and understand this poem
send something back:  a burning strand of hair
a still-warm, still-liquid drop of blood
a shell
thickened from being battered year on year
send something back.

It is an invitation.  It is a duty.  It is a way to honor and mourn.  Send something back.

Divining Gay Poets: Some Talk about Sex, the Soul, and Career

Posted on March 12, 2012 by Edit Team in Features, Opinion

One of the most anticipated and exciting events at the Associated Writers & Writing Programs Conference, held this year in Chicago, was the reading for Michael Montlack’s new poetry anthology Divining Divas: 100 Gay Men on their Muses (Lethe).  The conference, as always, was a highly successful event in which gay men, lesbians, and straight people alike received the opportunity to network and often times meet someone new.  That’s what happened when gay poets Michael Klein and Steve Fellner, who both participated at the reading for the anthology, sat down together at Rehab, the retro gay bar where the reading took place.  Their immediate rapport quickly evolved into firm affirmations about gay poetry and poets in general, as well as contentious yet respectful disagreements about community building and separating the truth from rumor, when it comes to something called a literary career.  When Klein and Fellner got home after the conference ended, that meeting in Chicago triggered the following dialogue between the two writers.  

Michael:  I thought it was a great reading and I really loathe most poetry readings because most people – dare I say straight people? – don’t know how to read poems out loud.  Maybe the fact that gay men are such good readers – a generalization, I know, but one I actually believe – has to do with the fact that so many of us have retreated into those imaginative worlds we made so long ago – first in our minds, and then in our own bedrooms:  singing along with records, reading sex scenes aloud to each other.  In many ways, the gay literary tradition is also an oral tradition.   We also know – some of us – how to sell a poem, and you, Steve,  made that great observation that the sign of a good poet was the quality of the patter.  No one really listens to the poem.  But I also know what it means to be judged, compared and all the other terrors that almost invisibly join forces in a room of gay men and, particular gay writers (which, since I stopped drinking 27 years ago, is usually the only time I’m in the company of so many gay men).  The fact is, the younger ones get all the attention.  And, I left the reading feeling old and unrecognized.  Does that surprise you?   I’ve been writing and publishing for more than 20 years, and I find it odd that there are so many young gay writers who have never read my work.  I read everything.  I’ve read their work and reviewed their work.  Why haven’t they read mine?

Steve:   I always get nervous about the idea of reciprocity.  I understand, and, I think you are correct in framing it as a serious and possibly unhealthy intergenerational gap.  For me, you have always been a touchstone with your anthologies, memoirs, and poetry.  At the same time, my only true concern is that a gay man—young or old— read something by someone queer, contributing to the economic welfare of our small presses like A Midsummer Night’s Press, Lethe Press, and Bryan Borland’s new Sibling Rivalry Press — which I understand will be publishing your new book of poems.  I wish this was a sign of unequivocal positivity.  But it isn’t.  A few years back I talked to the five finalists of a significant gay male poetry award before the winner had been announced.  I asked each of them to tell me which of their peers in the category they found truly exciting.  Totally open ended broad question.  Three of the five finalists said they never heard of any of their competitors before–and, I mean, any of them.  They never said they planned on reading them, or wanted to, either.  In fact, one joked, “to read them now, would be bad luck.  If I win, there’s no reason.  And if I lose, no way in hell will I ever even glance at their cover.”  I thought it was funny, so I laughed, and he said, “You do know I am serious.  All gay poetry is the same, anyway.”  And I sort of agree with that, and I sort of don’t.  I can’t help but wonder even with the brilliant way Michael Montlack devised and organized his anthology, how many gay male poets will find a poem they love and then actually buy his book?  For me, that’s one of the exciting things about an anthology: it gives the illusion that the world of poetry is somehow manageable and containable.

Michael:   Well, I think people buy anthologies — gay anthologies — more than they buy a gay man’s single book of poems and you would think (or at least hope) that a side effect of any anthology would be precisely that it would get people interested in an array of individual works.  As for those badly read gay finalists — I know exactly what you mean.  I sat with two young gay poets at AWP (away from the Diva reading) who I know had never read my work, asked me about anything to do with poetry, nor, more disappointedly were even interested in who I was reading.  We mostly talked about what type of other man we liked and who our boyfriends were.  As for all gay poetry being the same anyway — or sort of the same, anyway — say it isn’t true!  Still, I do think we tend to either be almost bizarre-ly confessional (i.e., can’t get out of our own way with our own story), or cryptic or some strange combination of both.  And I do think there is a gay aesthetic — as wildly wide as it may be.  Wayne Koestenbaum and James Schulyer are different poets, but there is a literary aesthetic there which they both share and it has nothing to do with subject matter that I would have to call gay — a tone, a certain vision.

Steve:   Men can be rigid in their approval of certain aesthetics and subject matter, and gay men can be as sexist as straight men.  One of the things that impressed me about Michael’s reading was that he went out of his way to be inclusive.  And I’m of two minds about that.  I say this solely because it was an issue that I faced in my search for my blurbs for my own book.  For me, the collecting of blurbs is something special.  I NEVER ask people who I have met in person or know in any way other than the fact that I have read their poems.  I want to use my book as a way of saying to someone “I like you,” and hope that when I ask them to consider writing me a blurb, if they should like my book, they say, “I like you, too.”  A lot of times people say no.  And gay men have more often than not said no.  Or didn’t even respond.  At the reading, there was one person who said no to my latest book and I carefully avoided them.  And because they hung out with some people I wanted to like me, too, I hid even more determinedly.  Once I got my big blurb rejection for my latest book, I swore to myself I would never ask a gay man for anything again related to poetry.  All my blurbs are from women who are heterosexual and often have children.

Michael:  Oh, women are so much smarter than men.  Of course, you want them on the back of your book.  And I see nothing wrong with asking people you’ve met in person for a blurb, but I don’t think you should know them very well, certainly.  I also don’t make a point of asking people for a blurb based on their sexual orientation in any way.  I usually just ask people, like you, whose poetry I like and I think would like mine.  Of course, it can always be tricky, too — like the time I asked someone to blurb my last book and he sent me something that was largely made up of two lines from one of the poems in my own book!  That’s disheartening, to say the least.  There’s a certain imagination a blurb requires and for someone to simply reiterate what they’re supposed to be elaborating on is just lazy.  I don’t avoid or go out of my way when it comes to other poets, gay or otherwise.  I just tend to be drawn to the ones who talk about ideas and not so much about shop, publishing, etc., etc.  I just find that kind of exchange really boring and completely up to chance, in the long run.

Steve:  Not drawn to the ones who talk about shop!  I don’t completely believe you on that one.  That’s one of the reasons I was immediately attracted to you, and bothered by you.  You do it in such a contagiously cheerful way!  Sometimes you’re mistaken, and sometimes you’re off-base, and sometimes you piss me off, but you do it in a way that builds community—you always want to know what everyone else thinks.  And yes, you can claim that it’s an intelligent and comprehensive talk about someone ‘s poetry.  But at the same time, and I know this is a quite unfashionable to say, when you talk about someone’s poems you are talking about their soul, too.  When I offer critiques of other people’s works, I am using the poem as a basis for my assessment, but, I know, that it is inevitably a personal thing—if you are not careful, you can be mean.  Personally, I think we need to be more in each others’ faces.  If there is less and less space for poetry reviews and more and more writers (due to the proliferation of MFA programs, etc. etc.), we have to find a way to connect with one another.  It must be done somehow, and talking behind someone’s back, as long as you’re not trying to hurt someone’s career, or are wholly unkind, is a proper, and possibly even, necessary way to do it.

Michael:  Everybody I know – unless they are dead or sober to the point of sainthood – talks behind someone’s back:  nicely, meanly, stupidly or with great insight.  Cruelty takes a certain intelligence, after all.  Saying that there needs to be more of that kind of thing is sort of like saying there needs to be more gossip.  It’s going to be there for time eternal and there is always probably going to be too much of it. Yes, I like talking shop, because I like gossip, but I only want it as a place to originate a real conversation from.  If I’ve spent too long a time with someone only talking shop, I leave the experience not knowing anything about their soul and, as you say, I think poems are representative of souls, particularly the ones, obviously, I live by.  I also think there will always be a place for reviews and have noticed them popping up, actually, at an alarming rate.  There are more websites than ever that only broadcast reviews (which I think is sort of boring, actually), and there has been in the last few years a real commitment (your own Pansy Poetics is a good example) of really well written and generous commentary on poetry from communities that aren’t particularly known for their critical thinking — and I think the gay community can certainly be that way.  I also think, for myself, because of the proliferation of websites to do reviews, I have become increasingly aware of many small presses that I would never know about otherwise.  As for hurting someone’s career by talking about them or behind their backs?  There are certain poets for whom, no matter what you say, are going to succeed no matter what anybody says about them.  We both know a nasty, not well liked gay poet who – no matter how hard people bad mouth him – lands in jackpot after jackpot.  And, he’s not even young!  Where is the justice in that, I ask you?!?!?

Steve:  Recently I had a major altercation with a gay male writer who I respect very well.  We never met in person; our conversations happened to be all on-line.  I became acquainted with him simply through his poems.  For me, someone who lives inWestern New York, who does not drive for a number of reasons, this was an important relationship. One day I woke up and there were a number of emails in my mailbox asking me what I did to offend this person.  I still don’t know exactly what I did.  In the final email, he wrote to me, he said: “Don’t ever pretend like you know me.”  I was so hurt and upset.  I felt like I did know him. Not through just the social networking.  But through his poems.  I really believe you can discover someone’s soul through their poems.

Michael:  You discover their soul and you discover their shortcomings, as well.  I always find it interesting in reading criticism how sometimes a writer will focus on what’s not in the poem as a way of intimating, perhaps, what’s not in the person as well.  I’m always sort of dismayed and saddened when I can’t have the whole array of language to express what I want to say in a poem, though, and while the soul is there, a certain soul sickness can be there, too.  I mean, let’s be specific for a moment:  in Henri Cole’s new book, Touch, there are many self-flagellating poems that could be construed as sad homosexual poems.  They call back  — though much better written than Tennessee Williams’ poems — to that kind of morose and weirdly hyperbolic kind of self-hating poem written in the 50s.  And yet, Henri has every right to be as self-hating or sad as he wants to be and that poem will be judged the way he himself would be judged — if one goes along with your thinking about poem=’ing soul.  But still, I wonder, is it fair?  Poetry may reveal the soul, but it’s also a representative.

Steve:  I think one of the things I really like about Henri Cole is that I would say there’s an “honorable” sadness in his work.  His poems can be self-eviscerating. One of the things that I respect is his prioritization of aesthetics; he makes the self-pity or even self-hatred in its own way transcendent.

I do read a lot of gay poetry for my blog and one of the most exciting, one of the best two or three volumes I read last year was what I suppose would be labeled as a chapbook (it comes in at under 48 pages)—but has more power and depth than most of the ones I read which are overlong.  (Why is it that gay men don’t want to pare down their books?)  This amazing book is called The Thames & Hudson Project, written by Hansa Bergwall and Timothy Liu—one of the many, many things I love about it is that it offers a polemic at the start of the book, a challenge to how gay men choose to write about desire and love.  It isn’t one of those books that claim that the gateway to middle-aged maturity is abandoning sex and having a kid.  At the same time, it raises philosophical questions regarding how middle-aged queers can find a new space.  I think it also may be of interest to you because as you mentioned there’s an intergenerational gap which I think not only exists in the actual real spaces, but also there’s a dearth of stuff that deals with growing older.

Michael:  The younger gay poets are still writing about sex and we older, jaded queers have figured out (particularly if we haven’t been in a lot of relationships for whatever reason) that sex is a vehicle for other kinds of experiences.  As Larry Kramer says, the mind is the sexiest part of the body.  Or, as my friend, Ricky Ian Gordon said years ago:  There was a time when men aspired to be Michelangelo, now they aspire to be David.  And you can say that young guys are writing the David poems and the older ones, the Michelangelo poems.  I don’t mean this as a judgment, by the way.  I think there are some young poets–Angelo Nikolopoulos comes immediately to mind–who are writing ground-breaking poems about sex and to think that after all this time, those poems could actually be written.  And yet, for me, I also look to the eroticism that comes from reading the mind more than the body.  Henri Cole’s work does that, Scott Hightower’s new book (which is wonderful, by the way:  Self-Evident) does that and that venerable poet of excess and ecstasy:  Wayne Koestenbaum.  And I think some of the poems in Divining Divas speak to the “personality” of sexuality, which is desire.

Steve:  Yes.  One of my many favorites in the anthology is one by B.C. Edwards who choose Parker Posey as his muse.  His poem is inventively called “You Smoke Like You Smoke When You’re Working.”  The poem evolves from the narrator’s fantasy of a three-way romantic triangle between himself, a sexy male bartender, and Parker Posey.  It isn’t really in any way a tribute to Parker Posey, even if the narrator describes the gay icon’s laughter as a cross between “Brillo pads and diamonds,” her “Onassis hair like a hoodie.”  Instead the narrator imagines exploiting his muse as a way of drawing the attention of the bartender who he wants.  The ambiguity of the narrator’s tribute arises in the ending when he fails to lure the bartender, but still feels, being seated next to the famous Parker Posey, “the way gods do.”  In other words, the narrator is uninterested in purely lavishing praise upon Parker Posey, but instead sees her as an unsuccessful tool in capturing the object of his desire.  I love that the poem ridicules the whole idea of heroine worship—the whole subject of the anthology.  The poem is remarkable for the way it delineates the creepy way that gay men exploit women to achieve their own goal: the love of a man with an unclear sexuality.  Through his wise selection of poems, Montlack hold gay men responsible for their own dubiously ethical actions.

Michael:  Apart from heroine worship, there is also the poem about becoming the Diva herself through writing her down: that widescreen on which the poet projects, to borrow from Kenneth Koch, one’s own wishes, lies and dreams.  Jericho Brown does this wonderfully, I think, in his poem “Track 4:  Reflections” about Diana Ross.  While it honors in a way a certain singer named Diana Ross, it also counts the time in which someone like her could thrive.  “I could hear the sun sing in 1968,” she says in the poem, which is more than just getting the song down right; it’s a proclamation, too about what it means to be a black woman at a particular time in history:  “…That was power — /White folks looking at me//Directly and going blind//So they wouldn’t have to see/What in the world was burning black.”  That double meaning at the end, I think, really points to the cost of fame and the ambiguity of who pays that cost.

Steve: I also like that Montlack provides yet another poem that calls into question the whole nature of the anthology itself.  Obviously, a lot of the poems are steeped in nostalgia, sometimes, often times, unqualified, unabashed nostalgia.  When you’re writing about female influences from the past, how could you not?  However, when you create an anthology, you want to have checks and balances.  I love Michael Broder’s poem “Priamel.”  The opening immediately establishes a comic philosophical inquiry: “You can’t really I don’t think write it today the kind of poem Sappho wrote six hundred years before Christ.” This mock resignation is bookended with a pretty unflinching critique of our desire to romanticize women through poetry.  Of course, he uses metaphor to state his case: “…the past ships that remind us of an earlier time or at least bring to mind what we think an earlier time was like and we think that time was simpler and therefore better than now.”  I like the fact that Broder calls poets (and the audience) out, identifying the silliness of nostalgia, our dumb need to make pretty (once again) what has already been .

Michael:  I think any time that we’re not living in was better and simpler which is why the past – is it Faulkner? – isn’t even the past.  I also think that AIDS has completely altered the way in which gay men know the past and, as it happens, how their own sexuality is framed.  I know young men who don’t know what sex without a condom feels like or have ever tasted semen.  While the big picture-ness of this might not seem like a big deal, I think its very specificity has to do with what we have to say as writers and particularly what we have to say as writers if we’re writing about sex.  What would Dennis Cooper sound like if he were someone just starting to write those early poems of his?  While the imagination may have no known context, personal revelation, subject matter, does.

Steve Fellner’s latest book of poetry is The Weary World Rejoices (Marsh Hawk Press, 2011).  His first book of poems, Blind Date With Cavafy won the 2008 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry.  He blogs about gay male poetry at http://pansypoetics.blogspot.com

Michael Klein’s newest book of poems, The Talking Day, will be published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2013 and his last book, then, we were still living, was a Lambda Literary Award finalist.  His first book of poems, 1990, won the award in 1993.

Writing & Illness: More Than Metaphor

Posted on March 11, 2012 by Victoria Brownworth in Features, Opinion

In the room where I used to write every day stands a cork board with photographs of women writers and artists I love. Some, like Audre Lorde and Muriel Ruykeyser, I have been privileged to know. Others, like Flannery O’Connor, Lillian Hellman and Virginia Woolf have informed my work, but were dead before I was a writer myself.

In the photograph of O’Connor, she stands on her front steps in a dress with a very full skirt. She stands with the aid of her crutches. At her feet is a peacock, its head bent and tail unfanned, but magnificent nonetheless. (more…)

Reader Meet Author: Personal Advice from a LGBTQ Author

Posted on February 9, 2012 by William Johnson in Features, Opinion

Do you have problems with your love life? Don’t get along with your in-laws? Are your co-workers irksome? All life’s problem can be answered through literature —or maybe at least by the people who create it. With that in mind, we here at The Lambda Literary Review are starting our very own advice column called “Reader Meet Author.”  Think of the column as sort of a “Dear Abby” for the LGBTQ literary set. (more…)