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Book Buzz is a monthly column of news and noteworthy tidbits from the LGBT writing and publishing community. Book release announcements (pub dates) will continue to be covered elsewhere while Book Buzz looks for a different “angle” – an award, milestone, notable reissue, film deal, rave review, event of national interest, etc. Submit your brief item to John Morgan Wilson at jmwwriter@aol.com. No attachments please.
 February 2010
The American Library Association has announced its 2010 Stonewall Book Awards, given annually to English-language LGBT books of exceptional merit: fiction, Stray Dog Winter (MacAdam/Cage) by David Francis; non-fiction, Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America (St. Martin’s Press) by Nathanial Frank; and children’s and young adult literature, The Vast Fields of Ordinary (Penguin Group) by Nick Burd. For details on the books and all nominees, go to http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/rts/glbtrt/stonewall/index.cfm.
Nominee Lesléa Newman’s Mommy, Mama, and Me and Daddy, Papa, and Me (both from Tricycle Press, illustrated by Carol Thompson)were named ALA Stonewall Honor Books and included on its Rainbow Reading list (http://rainbowlist.wordpress.com/rl-2010/). Mommy, Mama, and Me was also named an ALA Notable Book for Children.
D. A. Powell’s poetry collection, Chronic (Graywolf Press), is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, to be announced March 11. Chronic was also selected as a best book of the year by Publishers Weekly and the Kansas City Star.
The Review Site Speak Its Name has chosen Charlie Cochrane as 2009’s Author of the Year for her Cambridge Fellows Mysteries series (Samhain). Here the link to all the honorees: http://speakitsname.com/2009/12/31/round-up-of-the-best-of-the-year/.
Author Christopher Rice has donated $25,000 to the city of West Hollywood to help with the construction of Library Park, a major new civic centerpiece and cultural landmark, which has already broken ground. Included in the new library will be a special collection of LGBT literature and another devoted to HIV/AIDS. Vital fund-raising continues (www.weholibraryfund.org) and every dollar helps. (For those blessed with cushy bank accounts, please see my related overture further down.)
Looking for a literary alternative to the Super Bowl on February 7? You might log on to www.shadowunit.org, which starts its third season on Super Bowl Sunday, offering character blogs, serial narrative, and innovative, storytelling interactivity. Among those involved: Elizabeth Bear, Emma Bull, Amanda Downum, and Sarah Monette. (Elizabeth is also our Book Buzz Interview this month, anchoring this column.)
February is Queer Horror Month at Dark Scribe (www.DarkScribeMagazine.com), featuring interviews with Tom Cardamone, Jameson Currier, and Lee Thomas, plus a roundtable discussion on the state of queer horror.
Meanwhile, Dark Scribe Press has premiered a snazzy trailer for its newest title, In the Closet, Under the Bed, by Lambda Literary Award and Bram Stoker Award-winner Lee Thomas. Here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-P-5ytvZtM.
The Robert Chesley Foundation, established by Victor Bumbalo in 1993 in playwright Robert Chesley’s honor to support playwrights of gay and lesbian theatre, has a new website: www.chesleyfoundation.org.
Chip Livingston, a widely-published and award-winning gay poet of mixed Creek heritage, has collected much of his best work into a debut collection, Museum of False Starts. It’s out next month from Gival Press (www.givalpress.com).
Genia Stevens interviewed Mikaya Heart, author of My Sweet Wild Dance, on Sisters Talk Radio (http://www.blogtalkradio.com/sisters_talk), the online queer talk radio show. My Sweet Wild Dance is the true story of Mikaya’s turbulent life growing up lesbian in Scotland in the ‘50s. Tune in at http://www.facebook.com/l/44a11;bit.ly/5uBYc2.
Submissions for the winter issue of Mary (www.maryliterary.com), “a cute homo version of Reader’s Digest,” need to reach editor William Johnson by February 30. The LGBT literary quarterly made its debut last fall with several author interviews and contributions from eighteen writers. Mary pays small honorariums and welcomes submissions for both its print and web publications in prose, poetry, or essay format.
El Museo del Barrio's Speak Up! Speak Out! chapbook, featuring the poetry of Edwin Torres, Mahina Movement, Caridad De La Luz, and Emanuel Xavier (who also edited), with art by Juan Betancurth, is downloadable as a free PDF file by clicking “More” at http://www.elmuseo.org/en/event/edwin-torres-speaks-out-vox.
To hear Jee Leong Koh reading from Equal to the Earth, his first full-length collection, click on http://www.facebook.com/l/4a0a9;www.benchpresspoetry.com.
It’s been a decade since Kensington published the Lammy-winning, ‘70s coming-of-age novel The World of Normal Boys, by K.M. Soehnlein. Now comes a sequel, Robin and Ruby, for release in early April. It follows Robin from Normal Boys and his sister Ruby over the course of a life-changing weekend in the mid-‘80s. For Karl’s readings on both coasts, check his website: www.kmsoehnlein.com.
TnT Classic Books (www.tntclassicbooks.com), dedicated to post-Stonewall playwrights, has collected twenty-seven plays in Short Plays To Long Remember, due out March 28. Among the queer authors represented are Jane Chambers, Perry Brass, David Johnston, David Mauriello, Sidney Morris, and Doric Wilson.
Bold Strokes Books has acquired Paul Faraday’s new mystery satire, The Straight Shooter: A Nate Dainty Manhunt!, scheduled for release later this year.
The Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation, which awards yearly, $1,000 grants to selected writers of “full-length plays, screenplays, musicals or operas that present the gay and lesbian lifestyle in a positive manner,” is again open to new submissions. To be considered, work must be based on, or inspired by, a historic person, culture, event, or work of art. Grants are also awarded to filmmakers and production companies who meet similar criteria. For details, go to http://www.aabbfoundation.org/.
Tim Miller has begun touring with his new performance piece, “Lay of the Land.” Here’s a YouTube clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYrH-PKJPnA.
Last month, in partnership with the Houston Public Library, the Houston GLBT Community Center began a new, free, monthly literary series featuring LGBT writers. (The inaugural author was Rev. Rick Elliott, reading from his inspirational book, Faith Journeys of the Heart.) For upcoming programs, go to www.hglbtcc.org.
NLA: International, dedicated to the pansexual leather community, has expanded its annual writing awards for excellence in SM/leather/fetish writing. Nominations are now being accepted for non-fiction books, articles, novels, short fiction, and anthologies first published between January 1, 2009 and December 31, 2009. The deadline for submission is February 29. Details at http://www.nla-i.com.
Partners in life for twelve years, poets William Reichard and James Cihlar will also be reading partners this spring at various locations to celebrate William's fourth collection, Sin Eater, and James’s first, Undoing. To find out where and when, use this link: http://www.williamreichard.com. James has also been busy reviewing for the poetry site Coldfront (http://coldfrontmag.com), with recent reviews of Louise Glück’s A Village Life and Mary Jo Bang's The Bride of E.
Vice London editor Bruno Bayley interviews Jack Fritscher about gay literature and censorship at http://www.viceland.com/int/v17n1/htdocs/erotic-fiction-puritan-censorship-314.php.
New Town Writers, Chicago's LGBT writing and performance group, is accepting submissions from writers and artists in the Midwest for Swell, NTW’s online zine, and Off the Rocks, its print magazine. The submission deadline for both publications is March 15. For more details, go to http://www.newtownwriters.org
”The Lord of the Orchards,” a comprehensive online feature from Jeffrey Beam and Richard Owens on the life and work of gay Black Mountain poet, publisher, and photographer Jonathan Williams, can be read at John Tranter’s literary magazine, Jacket. Here’s the link: http://jacketmagazine.com/38/index.shtml#jw.
Facebook has reportedly banned advertising for Perry Brass’s The Manly Art of Seduction and Sam Martino, news editor of Out in Jersey, has written about it at http://outinjersey.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=608:facing-homophobia-with-facebook&Itemid=1.
Adam Lowe's science fiction novel Troglodyte Rose (Crossing Chaos/Enigmatic Ink), due out April 1, has been earning positive early reviews, including this from Leeds Guide: “Strange, creepy, hilarious, disgusting and simply fantastic... Not for the faint hearted but a must for any fan of sci-fi, strong, modern writing or pure originality.”
Raymond Luczak has a new PDF sampler and a book trailer for his deaf gay novel, Men with Their Hands: http://www.raymondluczak.com/menwiththeirhands.
"Tenochtitlan," a story by James Magruder (www.jamesmagruder.com), first published in Subtropics, has been selected for the anthology New Stories from the Midwest, due out from Ohio University Press in the winter of 2010/11.
Patricia Nell Warren is working on My West, an anthology collecting the best of her many short nonfiction pieces about the American West written over more than half a century, including a section of her writings on LGBT people in the West. Look for it from her own Wildcat Press, tentatively this fall.
Rick R. Reed’s novel, Deadly Vision, is now available as an e-book from Bristlecone Pine Press. Here’s the link: http://www.facebook.com/l/06cbb;tinyurl.com/y8epaep.
Finally: Regarding West Hollywood’s $64 million Library Park project, which will reflect the city’s unique identity and provide much needed resources and services, including a safe place for gay youth to privately read LGBT literature: I’m on the host committee for a gala February 22 reception and silent auction to be held for select individuals who are in a position to donate $5,000 to $10,000 to help reach the Library Fund’s $10 million private philanthropy goal (we’re more than halfway there). If this is you, and you feel the cause is worthy, please contact me soon at jmwwriter@aol.com. Again, here’s the link for more information: http://weholibraryfund.org/.
And now, the Book Buzz Interview, with Elizabeth Bear:
 Elizabeth Bear (www.elizabethbear.com), strongly identified with speculative fiction, is the Sturgeon and multiple Hugo Award-winning author of over 70 short stories and 20 novels. Her most recent Hugo came last year for Best Novelette for Shoggoths in Bloom. “Born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins,” she tells Book Buzz, “but in a different year,” she now lives in Connecticut “with a giant ridiculous dog, a cat who is an internet celebrity, the best roommate ever, and the roommate's enormous adolescent cat. Her hobbies include rock climbing and murdering helpless houseplants.”
JMW: You're best known for your speculative fiction. How do you define that, in terms of your own work?
EB: Oh, I'm sort of bad at definitions. And categories. They're not my strong suit. I guess I subscribe to the well-worn definition of "Whatever I am pointing at when I say speculative fiction." I like to call science fiction the literature of testing things to destruction – usually ideas, sometimes planets – but science fiction is only a small subset of spec fic.
JMW: How did you come to focus in this area of writing?
EB: I am a third generation SF fan, so I took it in with mother's milk. When I began writing myself, there was never any question what I would be writing – I grew up on wildly inappropriate books for children, including Joanna Russ and Suzy McKee Charnas. (They may have been inappropriate, but I don't see that they really did me any harm. Although I did have the opportunity to tell Suzy that her description of pregnancy was probably what put me off it for all time.)
JMW: What role does lesbianism play in your speculative fiction, and why?
EB: I've never really thought about lesbianism having a special role in my fiction. Lesbians are people; my books are about people; therefore, there are likely to be lesbians in my books. (Sometimes these people are nonhuman, which is a different complex of problems, but that's not germane to the point of the question.) I'm deeply suspicious of identity politics, having grown up in a radically separatist household and experienced it as a toxic paradigm. (I was a childhood refugee of the sex wars.) Apparently, however, the mere act of writing about lesbians, bisexuals, gay men, transpersons, genderqueer persons, and intersexed persons as if they were persons is a radical and shocking act. I've been accused of everything from writing gay porn to writing homosexual propaganda to rampant homophobia, and I've come to accept that such criticism often reveals more about the agenda of the reader than the writer.
JMW: Your work encompasses short fiction, novels, poetry, graphic novels, and even a bit of nonfiction. Is there any plan or blueprint for this, or is it more impulsive and purely creative?
EB: Oh, plans. I never mastered those either. I mean, I make a lot of them, but you know the old adage, right? Of course there are economic demands – I have to write a certain number of novels to pay the rent. I like short stories because they are easier to experiment in, and it's easier to push the envelope hard in ten pages than in four hundred. They fill different roles in the ecosystem. Cats and dogs and hawks are all predators, but they all fill different niches.
JMW: You started publishing with shorts in the mid-nineties but became quite productive with novels a few years ago. What changed in your creative life to account for this?
EB: Well, I lost my job after 9/11, which provided more time to write, which produced a creative breakthrough, which led to more publication. The fact of the matter is that early on, I just wasn't a very good writer. I was thrashing through, trying to learn. Becoming a better writer leads to more opportunities to write.
JMW: You have a lively and wicked sense of humor. Where does that come from and how does it influence your writing?
EB: Hah! Well thank you. Apparently, I come by it honestly. I'm a New Englander and a second-generation Swede, and both groups are noted for a certain dryness of wit. I've actually worked exceedingly hard to get any of that into my writing. In reworking some of my older stories, I've discovered that one of the flaws in my earlier work is that it's a bit, well, humorless, and takes itself very seriously.
JMW: You devote part of your website to journal writing, memories, etc. Tell us about that.
EB: My blog! Well, when I was a little baby barely-published writer, I was reading Neil Gaiman's blog (as who doesn't?), and he started talking about why he doesn't blog about writing. And the blog he was describing as not the one he wanted to write, it turns out, was exactly the one I would have wanted to read. So I decided if I were ever a published writer, I would write that blog – one that was a more or less accurate picture of a writer's daily life. The blogs I love most are the ones where people talk at length about jobs they excel at. So why not write the sort of thing I like to read?
JMW: You publish pretty widely. Any advice for writers about the speculative fiction marketplace, particularly for LGBT-related themes?
EB: There's a funny story about that. Which is that, for the longest time, I couldn't sell two stories to the same market. So I established a whole bunch of editorial relationships, which have served me in good stead since. I also have worked very hard to develop a reputation as somebody who meets her deadlines and hands in good work. I have to say that I have never received any pushback from editors or publishers about LGBT content in my work. Some reviewers and readers have been a little freaked out about it (sometimes aggressively so) but that's their prerogative.
JMW: What should we look for from you in the near future?
EB: An easy question! Bone & Jewel Creatures, a Middle Eastern steampunk fantasy forthcoming from Subterranean this spring. Chill, a post-human science fiction novel forthcoming from Spectra around the same time. The Sea Thy Mistress, a post-apocalyptic Norse techno-fantasy forthcoming from Tor next winter. My most recent release is By the Mountain Bound from Tor, a very, very, very cold book about wolves and valkyries and the end of the world. This book is very close to my heart: It has true love and apocalypse and swordfights and political intrigue and poetry. It's pretty nifty, if I do say so myself.
That’s all the Book Buzz for now. So, go read a book!
John Morgan Wilson’s most recent short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and BestGay Stories of 2009 (Lethe Press). John is also the author of the Benjamin Justice series, which has won an Edgar from Mystery Writers of America and three Lambda Literary Awards for best gay men’s mystery. Bold Strokes Books has reissued John’s early Justice novels, including his 1996 Edgar winner, Simple Justice. Spider Season (St. Martin’s Minotaur) is the eighth and latest in the series. You can read the first chapter at www.johnmorganwilson.com.
January 2010
Writers of many stripes were among 2009’s Out 100, including Frank Bruni, Mark Doty, Kerry Eleveld, Andrew Holleran, Tony Kushner, Arthur Laurents, Melinda Lo, Tina Mabry, John Marans, Felice Picano, Paul Rudnick, Sarah Schulman, Pam Spaulding, Michael Sucsy, Matt Tyranauer, Sarah Waters, and Edmund White. To see the complete list, plus profiles and photos, go to http://out.com/out100/index.asp.
Two books shared first place for Best Overall Gay Novel in the 2009 Rainbow Awards competition, founded last year “to celebrate the best in LGBT writing”: Out of Position, by Kyell Gold (Sofawolf Press), and Whistling in the Dark, by Tamara Allen (Lethe Press). More than twenty publishers participated. To view the finalists and winners in all categories, go to http://elisa-rolle.livejournal.com/887512.html
One of the Rainbow winners was Jere' M. Fishback’s Josef Jaeger (Prizm), a young adult novel that had previously won a Top Choice Award from Flamingnet Reviews.
The Village Voice has named Tim Lawrence’s Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992, one of the best books of 2009. Tim has started a blog with news about his biography and its gay subject. Here’s the link: http://www.timlawrence.info/arthur_russell/2009/Holda-On-to-Your-Dreams-blog.php.
Native Aliens Theatre Collective of New York is soliciting plays for its 11th annual short play festival, Short Stories 11, to be produced together during Gay Pride Week in June. The submission deadline is February 15. For guidelines, go to www.nativealiens.org.
Dog Ear Audio (www.dogearaudio.com), an audio book production company specializing in lesbian writing, has completed a makeover of its website, which now includes author interviews on video and audio samples of all Dog Ear titles.
Keith Pyeatt has been awarded the 2009 New Mexico Book Award for Best Mystery/Suspense Novel for his first published work, Struck, which features primary gay characters. Keith’s latest, Dark Knowledge, a paranormal riller, is now out as an e-book. Learn more at www.keithpyeatt.com.
The annual Saints and Sinners GLBT Literary Festival in New Orleans, set for May 13-16, has added more writer-participants, including Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Jim Grimsley, Emanuel Xavier, and Fiona Zedde. Registration information is now updated and online at www.sasfesat.org.
Arktoi Books’ Eloise Klein Healy tips me to The Future of Publishing Think Tank, an ad hoc group of writers and representatives of independent publishers and bookstores, nonprofit literary organizations, and community radio. To learn more about it and find bookstores and literary activities in your area, visit www.foptt.com.
Reviewing for Dark Scribe (www.darkscribemagazine.com), Vince A. Liaguno had high praise for Paul G. Bens' debut novel, Kelland (www.whoiskelland.com), calling it "a gorgeous, genre-defying novel of heartrending truth." Kelland was nominated in the Best Small Press Chill category in Dark Scribe's 3rd Annual Black Quill Awards.
Ellen Bass, whose most recent poetry collection is The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press) is interviewed by Robert Sward in the current issue of The Bloomsbury Review (www.bloomsburyreview.com).
Stephen Bottum’s Band of Thebes (www.bandofthebes.com) has posted its Best Books Survey 2009, with fifty-six gay writers responding with their favorite titles for the year. Here’s the link: http://bandofthebes.typepad.com/bandofthebes/2009/12/the-best-lgbt-books-of-2009-56-writers-select-their-favorites.html#more.
The current Mudlark features new poems from William Reichard. You can view them at http://www.unf.edu/mudlark/posters/reichard.html. Look for Richard’s new collection, Sin Eater, this spring from Mid-List Press (http://www.midlist.org/).
Nathan Manske’s website, "im from driftwood," collects and publishes true LGBT stories from all over the world, with a goal “to help gay youth feel not so alone” and to create a gay history archive. You can check it out at www.imfromdriftwood.com.
This fall, Northwestern University Press will publish Michael Alenyikov’s first book, Ivan & Misha: A Novel in Stories, revolving around a Russian immigrant family. The title story was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and anthologized in Best Gay Stories, 2008 (Lethe Press) and Tartts Four: Incisive Fiction from Emerging Writers (Livingston Press), part of Livingston’s Tartts Four Fiction Award competition.
Perry Brass is celebrating a personal milestone – publication of his fifteenth book, The Manly Art of Seduction, How to Meet, Talk to, and Become Intimate with Anyone. He’ll lead a related workshop on January 20, 7:30 pm, at the LGBT Center in New York. For details, go to http://manlyartworkshop.eventbrite.com.
Finalists have been announced in The Bywater Books Micro-Fiction Contest, co-sponsored with author Cynn Chadwick. First place went to “What We’re Meant to Know,” by Alex Williamson, followed by “Little Bliss,” by Cheryl Stonestreet. You can read them at http://cynnchadwick.wordpress.com/2009/12/25/and-the-winner-is/.
Patricia Nell Warren was interviewed in the Los Angeles Times in connection with the December launch of “Whatever Happened to Ennis del Mar,” at the Autry National Center for the American West in L.A. (www.autrynationalcenter.org), a lecture series exploring LGBT life and contributions to the American West. (Ennis del Mar is one of the two cowboy characters in Annie Proulx’s short story, “Brokeback Mountain,” portrayed by the late Heath Ledger in the film adaptation.) The Autry series, produced by author/filmmaker Gregory Hinton, continues on May 13 with "Hidden Histories." To read Patricia’s Bilerico Project piece on the ground-breaking series, use this link: http://www.bilerico.com/2009/12/out_west_event_at_the_autry_its_my_history_too.php
Damian Serbu's latest gay horror novel, Ghosts at Grandpa's House, will be published by Quest Books of Regal Crest Enterprises (www.regalcrest.biz) this summer.
Finally: My apologies to all of you who sent in your favorite books of 2009 for listing in this month’s Book Buzz. There were plenty, but I became ill and scrapped the list (and the editing involved) to trim my workload as deadline approached.
On a more positive note, I’ve got a story in the February issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine featuring a stalwart detective, Sergeant Katherine Forrest, who untangles a complicated mystery. The character’s name, of course, is a tribute to the author of the classic Curious Wine and many other novels, including some mysteries of her own.
And now, the Book Buzz Interview, with Richard Labonté:
.jpg) Richard Labonté, for more than twenty years a gay bookseller, has edited almost thirty anthologies, including the two-time Lambda Literary Award-winning Best Gay Erotica series from Cleis Press, as well as the Lambda winner First Person Queer (with Lawrence Schimel) from Arsenal Pulp Press. With Lawrence, Richard also co-edited The Future is Queer, Second Person Queer and I Like It Like That: True Tales of Gay Desire (the latter two both 2009 Lammy nominees) for Arsenal Pulp Press. Richard also writes a fortnightly book review column for Q Syndicate, reviews books in various categories for Publishers Weekly, and works as a freelance technical and manuscript editor. After college, beginning in 1971, he wrote and edited for the Citizen newspaper in Ottawa, Ontario for a decade. In 1979, he co-founded A Different Light Bookstores in Los Angeles, West Hollywood, San Francisco, and New York, and eventually managed them. Since returning to Canada in 2001, he has worked as a freelance editor and reviewer. He lives on rural Bowen Island, British Columbia with his American husband, Asa Dean Liles, who he met in San Francisco in 1992 and married in Canada in 2003. This year, Richard is coordinating the judging for the 2010 Lambda Literary Awards.
JMW: In 1980, at age 29, you became one of the first, if not the first, gay journalist in Canada to come out publicly in a mainstream publication. Tell us about that.
RL: I joined the Ottawa Citizen in 1972 as a copy boy and was night city editor by 1976, when I left the paper to spend a year living on a communal farm I'd bought with ten other college-era friends (we still own it, though now we are seven). But love, and a job offer I couldn't refuse, lured me back. I was freelancing coverage of the first Toronto Film Festival when I met Norman Laurila, the eventual co-owner (with the late George Leigh) of A Different Light. Coincidentally, the editor of the Ottawa newspaper offered me a new position as roaming columnist, with the mandate to write "Currents," about trends in society. Very free form. It was far easier for me to visit Norman in Toronto, and for Norman to visit me in Ottawa, given that my farm was then in the middle of nowhere. So I went back to the newspaper, where it was no secret among co-workers that I was queer. I touched on occasional gay topics in the Currents columns, which I was writing in addition to the first Canadian newspaper column about magazines, along with film and book reviews – all assessed through a queer prism. So I was already semi-open among my professional peers when I took a leave of absence in September, 1979 to move to Los Angeles with Norman to open the first branch of A Different Light. I returned ten months later in July of '80, and settled into the entertainment department.
One night, I spotted a story list on the day city editor's overnight spike about a series on gay life in Ottawa – the orgiastic baths, the salacious parks, the feverish sex, the nightmare of exposure...nothing positive. So I proposed a first-person piece about how good gay life could be, and had been for me, as a balance. Impact on me? Not much. I was the same able writer and capable editor, and even the blue-collar typographers treated me the same. Impact on the newspaper? Hundreds of angry cancellations and a weeks-long media fuss. Impact on the community? No death threats against me, but for a long time after teens and young adults were coming out to me on the streets and in letters sent to me at the paper. That was very moving, and lasted pretty much until I "retired" from the paper and returned in July 1982 to the U.S., where I lived for almost twenty years, working at various stretches with the ADL bookstores in L.A. and San Francisco, where I moved in 1988, while Norman managed the New York store. The New York store closed in 2001, the West Hollywood store in 2009. The only remaining store, in San Francisco, is a shadow of its former self. Eras end.
JMW: How did you get started editing erotic anthologies?
RL: In 1996, Felice Newman of Cleis Press asked me to take over as series editor of Best Gay Erotica after Michael Thomas Ford, who inaugurated the series with the first book, opted not to continue. Cleis needed the next "annual" anthology in three months, and Felice figured I knew a lot of writers whose work I could call in quickly. True – and we both enjoyed the experience, so much that I've been editing the series for fifteen years now.
JMW: Your gay anthologies are wide-ranging – erotica, romance, science fiction, bears, country boys, daddies, bondage, urban, muscle men, etc. How do you choose your themes?
RL: The themes choose me – I've been something of a utility editor for Cleis. All but two of the twenty-five and counting books for the press were proposed by the acquisitions editor, Frederique Delacoste, Cleis's co-publisher. Muscle Men, which I just turned in, was my proposal. I'd received stories with a muscle fetish that weren't quite right for other collections. The next book, Beautiful Boys, was also prompted by a few stories that weren't appropriate for other collections. I've also edited four anthologies for Arsenal Pulp Press, all conceived by my friend and co-editor Lawrence Schimel, a remarkably inventive fellow and all-around literary whiz, as editor, writer, poet, translator, etc.
JMW: Do the romance and erotica boundaries ever blend in the collections you edit, or do you feel there is a clear-cut line between them?
RL: The line isn't clear cut. I took over the Best Gay Romance series for Cleis a couple of years ago, and stories for that collection generally are less sexually edgy, more soft-focus, more... romantic. That said, there are many writers who have contributed to both the romance anthology and the more erotic books over the years. The one quality that unites them, I always hope, is strong writing with a literary bent.
JMW: I understand that you're personally fond of genre writing, particularly science fiction and pulpish mysteries. Why your love of genre fiction?
RL: I grew up on science fiction – I was a member of the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club at age 10, and by the time I moved to L.A. in '79 I had a library of more than a thousand books and of several thousand SF magazines, from pulps like Astonishing and Thrilling Wonder, and very early Amazing, to digest magazines like The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy, Worlds of If. Sadly, all were lost when the barn they were stored in on that farm I mentioned burned down one winter when I was in the U.S. I still read SF occasionally, but when I became a queer bookseller in '82, my focus was on what I was selling, and there was more than enough queer fiction to keep me busy as a reader. Plus, I read queer fiction constantly as a reviewer - since 2001, I've written almost 1,000 short LGBT book reviews for Book Marks, syndicated by Q Syndicate, and a few hundred more for the four years Books To Watch Out For was around, as well as reviews over the years for The Advocate, Update San Diego, Feminist Bookstore News, Q San Francisco, In Touch, PlanetOut and a slew of others. So now, when it's time to read a book I don't have to think about, I favor mostly mysteries and thrillers. Right now I'm reading Joseph Finder's Company Man. Last week I inhaled Stephen King's latest, Under the Dome.
JMW: Any advice for LGBT authors of short fiction, especially as it relates to anthologies?
RL: Prepare to be edited. I work with plenty of superb writers who need little more than a nudge here and a comma there, and receiving their contributions is always a treat. But the real satisfaction comes with working with a new and often first-time contributor. I'll cite twenty-two-year-old Rob Wolfsham as the most recent, someone who is open to editorial guidance. Also, I'll confess to being increasingly irked over the years by submissions that aren't the norm: double-spaced, a standard font, name and address on the cover page. But if the first page grabs me, I'll read at least some of an eight-point single-spaced submission in Comic Sans MS, before reformatting it. I'm doubly irked by stories that have nothing to do with the anthology's theme. In the course of a year, I probably receive 600-700 submissions for the various anthologies, and it's obvious that perhaps twenty percent of the time the writer paid no attention to the call for submissions.
JMW: What's coming up for you as an editor and/or writer?
RL: Whatever comes my way. Stories are arriving for Best Gay Erotica 2011 and Best Gay Romance 2011, and I'm putting together the third volume of Best of the Best Gay Erotica, selecting stories from BGE 2006 to BGE 2010. Do I have any interest in writing a book? Of course not – book reviews and the necessary anthology intros aside, I’m not a
writer. I have no plans for a book. Someone has to read them.
JMW: Tell us about your new role with the Lambda Literary Foundation.
RL: I've been involved with the Lambda Literary Awards from the inception, first as an attendee, then in assorted ways in selecting the nominees, the finalists, and the winners, most recently as a judge for several years in the Gay Fiction category. This year, after
Charles Flowers' departure as executive director and with no sense of how soon a permanent replacement would be found, Katherine Forrest, an old friend from my early L.A. days, asked if I'd take on the task of administering the Lammys judging process, which involves overseeing eighty judges reading material for twenty of the twenty-two categories. (Tony Valenzuela, who took over from Charles, is handling the Gay Erotica and LGBT Anthology categories, where three of my anthologies are nominated.) Why did I take on the job? Most simply, because Katherine asked me to. And because queer lit has been part of my life since I started reading it more than forty years ago (I started young) and selling it thirty years ago, and reviewing it since the early '80s. And because the Lammys are integral to the promotion of LGBT literature – all hail Deacon McCubbin, who launched the Lammys twenty-two years ago from Lambda Rising, the legendary Washington, DC bookstore. Its recent closing after thirty-five years in business is a sad day for the queer bookselling universe.
That’s all the Book Buzz for now. So, go read a book!
John Morgan Wilson’s most recent short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and BestGay Stories of 2009 (Lethe Press). John is also the author of the Benjamin Justice series, which has won an Edgar from Mystery Writers of America and three Lambda Literary Awards for best gay men’s mystery. Bold Strokes Books has reissued John’s early Justice novels, including his 1996 Edgar winner, Simple Justice. Spider Season (St. Martin’s Minotaur) is the eighth and latest in the series. You can read the first chapter at www.johnmorganwilson.com.
December 2009
Kensington Publishing’s Dafina imprint will honor the late E. Lynn Harris in June with Visible Lives: A Tribute to E. Lynn Harris, featuring novellas by Terrance Dean, James Earl Hardy and Stanley Bennett Clay, inspired by E. Lynn’s work. African-American gay men and their romances will be the focus of each story, with E. Lynn appearing as a minor character. Each author will also contribute a short essay about his personal relationship with the openly gay best-selling novelist, who died on July 24 at age 54.
Phillip Clark and David Groff, editors of Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS (Alyson Books), are donating their advance and any royalties to the PEN Fund for Writers and Editors with AIDS. Persistent Voices was released on December 1, World AIDS Day. They’ve set up a Facebook page with details on the collection: http://www.facebook.com/#/pages/Persistent-Voices-Poetry-by-Writers-Lost-to-AIDS/177649668845?ref=m. Check the page for upcoming events.
Katherine V. Forrest's classic love story, Curious Wine, was chosen as the most important lesbian novel of the 20th century by popular vote during Bywater Books' Celebration of Reading at Provincetown's Women's Week.
In other Bywater news, the publisher has acquired reprint rights to all of Marianne K. Martin’s novels. Bywater is also sponsoring a micro-fiction mystery contest with Cynn Chadwick, author of the Cat Rising series. Entry deadline is December 10. For details, go to http://cynnchadwick.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/micro-fiction-mystery-contest/. To check out Bywater’s other writing competitions, visit www.bywaterbooks.com.
Richard Bowes has won a World Fantasy Award for his novelette, If Angels Fight. Originally published in The Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy, the story was reprinted in Best Gay Stories 2009 (Lethe Press).
Maida Tilchen's lesbian-themed historical novel, Land Beyond Maps, is the winner of the 2009 New Mexico Book Award in the GLBT category. To learn more about Maida’s novel, go to http://landbeyondmaps.typepad.com/land_beyond_maps/.
Event organizer Paul Willis reports that the deadline for the fourth annual Saints and Sinners playwriting competition has been extended to December 31; the new deadline for the short fiction contest is January 2. Details at http://sasfest.org/.
The University of Minnesota Press, in collaboration with The Weinstein Company, has just launched a movie tie-in edition of Christopher Isherwood's best-known American novel, A Single Man, to coincide with this month’s release of the film of the same name, directed by Tom Ford and starring Colin Firth and Julianne Moore. You can see a trailer and a link to reading tools, book group tips, etc. at http://www.asingleman-book.com.
Ellen Hart’s seventeenth and latest Jane Lawless mystery, The Mirror and the Mask (St. Martin's/Minotaur), is earning raves, including a starred review in Library Journal. Meanwhile, Bella Books has been reissuing Ellen’s early Jane Lawless titles. Learn more about all of Ellen’s books and activities at www.ellenhart.com.
PBS interviewed Val McDermid about the film adaptation of her crime novels. The text is at http://www.pbs.org/remotelyconnected/2009/10/place_of_execution.html.
The third issue of Icarus: The Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction, published by Lethe Press, is out this month, featuring new, winter-themed fiction from Tanith Lee, Rod Santos, and Robert Joseph Levy, plus an interview with David Gerrold, and much more. Details at http://www.lethepressbooks.com/icarus.html.
Erastes is inviting readers and writers to visit the new Facebook presence for Speak Its Name, “the only place on the planet for gay historical fiction reviews and news.” Here’s the link: http://www.facebook.com/l/829e9;www.speakitsname.wordpress.com. She plans to post reviews at the rate of about one a day.
Lethe Press publisher Steve Berman will excerpt a piece from Mark Thompson's new memoir, Advocate Days & Other Stories (Queer MoJo) for his upcoming Best Gay Stories 2010 anthology. The excerpt movingly recounts the day when Advocate editor Robert I. McQueen met with Mark, then the Advocate's cultural affairs editor, for the last time in 1988, as Mark took over as editor. Like many on the staff at that time, Robert was dying from AIDS. Best Gay Stories 2010 will be out this spring.
Bella Books has acquired Lynn James' first novel, Wildfire, for summer 2010 publication. Wildfire blends romance with issues surrounding protection of the Pacific Northwest forestlands where she grew up. For more about Lynn’s debut novel, go to http://www.bellabooks.com/bellaforum/index.php?topic=1116.0.
Tish Pearlman’s "Out of Bounds" (www.outofboundsradioshow.com), heard live in upstate New York on WEOS-FM, can now be heard live as well on WSKG-FM. Go to www.wskg.org and click "Listen Live." The schedule: Thursdays at 7 p.m. on WEOS and Sundays at 11:30 a.m. on WSKG.
Facebook has a new group, "GLBT Writers and Readers," which you can access at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=7108729185.
Jamie Schaffner placed third in the 2009 UCLA Kirkwood Literary Prize for an excerpt from Get the Girl, her novel about a budding lesbian trapped in high school in the ‘80s. Read an interview and excerpt: http://www2.uclaextension.edu/writers/feature.php?recordID=98.
Robert Dunbar has a trailer up for his new horror novel, Martyrs & Monsters, plus some laudatory reviews, at www.DunbarAuthor.com.
Rather than the traditional "selected poems of" collection, gay poet Emanuel Xavier will release a spoken word/music CD, Legendary- The Spoken Word Poetry of Emanuel Xavier later this month. For details, go to www.cdbaby.com.
Now in its fifth year, Kathleen Warnock's free monthly reading series – “Drunken! Careening! Writers!” – is going strong on the third Thursday of every month at KGB Bar (www.kgbbar.com), 85 E. 4th St., NYC. Contributors to the latest edition of Best Lesbian Erotica (Cleis Press) will read on Dec. 17, starting at 7 p.m.
If you’ve been following Steven Reigns’s S(t)even Years Project, he’s got a new chapbook out, As If Memories Were Not Enough. The endeavor is a seven-year endurance art project “designed to ease the boundaries between art and life,” mentored by Linda Montano. To learn more, go to www.stevenreigns.com.
Rick Reed’s “My Perfect Date with an AIDS-Afflicted Felon” is up on the true-crime blog, In Cold Blog, recounting his relationship with a Florida State Pen inmate. You can read it at http://www.facebook.com/l/173e3;incoldblogger.blogspot.com/2009/11/my-perfect-date-with-aids-afflicted.html.
Lesléa Newman’s Mommy, Mama, and Me and Daddy, Papa, and Me have won an Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Gold Seal Best Book Award. Here’s the link: http://www.lesleakids.com/mommy.html. Also, Lesléa’s poem, "Old Girl," from her Nobody’s Mother collection, has received a Certificate of Excellence and a Muse Medallion from the Cat Writers Association. You can read excerpts and reviews at http://www.lesleanewman.com/newbks.htm.
Lammy-winning poet Ellen Bass provides updates on contests, workshops, calls for submissions, etc. through her newsletter. To sign up, go to www.ellenbass.com.
Finally: I’m grateful to be able to write Book Buzz but I need some help from contributors. When you submit an item, please make it complete but simple – a few lines, if possible. Long, rambling, or overly chatty e-mails are challenging to read, compress, and edit. Just give me the who, what, when, where, how, and a web link, and perhaps an extra line or two if there’s a special angle to your item. Thanks!
And now, the Book Buzz Interview, with James Magruder:
 As a writer, James Magruder works in several fields, with wide-ranging credits. His stories have appeared or are soon to appear in The Gettysburg Review, The Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, Bloom, Subtropics, The Normal School, and the anthology Boy Crazy. His theatrical adaptations of Molière, Marivaux, Lesage, Labiche, Dickens, and Gozzi, as well as his own plays, have been seen on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and across the United States. He teaches at the Yale School of Drama and Swarthmore College. Sugarless, his debut novel, was published in October by the University of Wisconsin Press. An offbeat gay coming-of-age novel, it was named one of “20 Indies to Watch” by Publishers Weekly.
JMW: Your background is primarily stage. How did you come to write Sugarless?
JM: In the summer of 2001 I finished a draft of a play one week early during a residency at the MacDowell Colony. Rather than go home or go swimming, I dared myself to write a story, which I hadn't done since college, some twenty years previous. It felt okay and, more important, it suggested other stories. When I returned to Baltimore, I wrote another story, then the first chapter of what became Sugarless, then another story, then another chapter, etcetera. Sugarless eventually took precedence, but in the meantime, three journals had accepted stories, a thrill utterly unlike anything I had experienced in show business heretofore. That convinced me that I wasn't utterly untalented at the form, though my apprenticeship in the ways and means of fiction continues to this day. In fact, it was only last month that one of my third-person stories was finally accepted by a journal. For seven years I couldn't get arrested in the third person – I think that's partly because of my theater background and partly because I didn't have a writing group or MFA cohort to help me through my very obvious mistakes. At any rate, while concurrently working on more pressing theater projects, I finally finished a first draft of the novel in June of 2005.
JMW: Tell us about the characters and story, their inspiration, and why you chose this material for your first novel.
JM: My earliest stories are about stupid mistakes I made with older men in my early twenties. Sugarless goes back even earlier, to high school, to Richard Lahrem's sophomore year in a Western suburb of Chicago in 1976. For much of the book, I had to gaze no further than my navel. Like Rick, I was given eight minutes of The Boys in the Band to perform in interscholastic speech tournaments; like Rick, I had a brutish stepfather, a sexually precocious stepsister who moved in with us for a while, and a mother who turned to Jesus that same year. Like Rick, I found an escape in my collection of Broadway cast recordings. Unlike Rick, I was a smart achiever who enjoyed school as much as any proto-queer kid can. Class and its indicators are huge for me; I had always wanted to write about my father remarrying 'up' and my mother remarrying 'down.' The original title for the novel was Marrying Down. And I also wanted to pay homage to the fun I had on speech team, a geek activity ripe for discovery by the culture at large. Finally, the 70's was a strange decade to recall in prose – wildly permissive yet strangely innocent.
JMW: How did Sugarless come to be published? What was the process for you?
JM: After five or six drafts, I got an agent in 2006. That miracle led me to believe, foolishly, that it would only take a month or two to get a contract. Every house you can think of turned it down, though it did get close a couple of places. There is a lot of sex in Sugarless, much of it intergenerational, and neither Richard nor I pass judgment on Ned, the older speech coach from another school who initiates him sexually. Now why did I think that wasn't going to be a problem? At any rate, a wonderful friend and writer of fiction and drama, Dick Scanlan, read the manuscript and had one fantastic note I followed. He remarked that the story of a gay teenager who comes out via the medium of Broadway show music, no matter how engagingly written, wasn't the freshest he'd ever read, but that there was a new story in Sugarless, and one that even had potential crossover appeal, namely, that of a child who loses a parent to a belief system. I felt I had sufficiently worked over my mother's turn to Jesus in play form, but Dick's was a great note. I did one more draft, foregrounding the fraying tie between Rick and his mother Marie. In April of 2008, I sent it to University of Wisconsin Press, which has a sub-specialty of GLBT fiction and memoirs, and within a week, I got word from the Acquisitions Editor, Raphael Kadushin, not to send it anywhere else, as they were seriously considering it for publication. I spent that summer praying to every deity known to man that the two outside readers – an editorial given for the university press process – would give Sugarless the go-ahead.
JMW: Can you talk about the difference between writing for stage and writing prose fiction? The differing challenges and rewards of each?
JM: Fiction is harder and slower for me. A play-in-process is a competing group narrative of first-person voices, and the clichéd idea of listening to them and taking dictation actually holds true in my experience. You do have to strive – always – to construct and stoke an ongoing conflict. "Show, don't tell" is an even stronger dictum for the stage, and there can be no idling. The sentences I hate to write in a story or novel (probably because I don't do them well) are called blocking in the theater: "She crossed the room and answered the door." The director takes care of that. Similarly, "Chestnut hair framed her pale, oval face." The actress you cast takes care of that. Turbulent inner states – that’s subtext you expect the actors and director to figure out and activate on the lines of dialogue. Plays depend on form and structure in ways novels don't have to. Plays are "crafty" – as are short stories to a lesser degree. The great glory (and curse) of the theater is that it needs an audience. The reward of fiction is its dependence on language to do all the work.
JMW: Getting a novel published is challenge enough for most writers but getting a play produced well must be even more daunting. Can you talk about that?
JM: Having lived through both now, I think getting a novel into print is tougher, because there are so few venues. Stories are hard to place, but at least there are several hundred journals to besiege. The biggest metropolitan areas have dozens of theaters – of varying quality and size – doing new work at every level of production: cold reading, staged reading, workshop. You can hear your own play-in-process every night of the week, and continue to improve it, provided you have a box of wine and enough friends to read each part. Most theaters worth their salt apply for grants to fund and develop new work. There are dozens of prizes out there for new plays, many with production opportunities attached. What you need in the theater, and this is its other chief glory (and grievance) is collaborators, and believe me, everybody wants to be in show business.
JMW: Can you offer any concrete advice to aspiring LGBT playwrights about the steps they need to take to get established?
JM: To develop your sense of theater (the event) and drama (the text), you must read and see as many plays, in as many different styles and genres, not just LGBT, as possible. Re-read them carefully to see how they work. Hear them aloud with friends and analyze how and why they work. If you cannot afford to, volunteer usher at the theaters in your city. A bad play can teach you as much as a good play. If you see a production or read a play that inspires you, don't hesitate to contact the writer and/or director. Theater people are gregarious by nature. Become part of a playwriting group. Take a class that offers writing exercises every week. Or start one at the nearest LGBT cultural center near you. Take an acting class. Take an improv class to get a sense of what it feels like to be in the "perpetual present" of the theater. Hear your plays aloud. Do not act or read in your own plays – you won't be able to hear them as well. Rewrite ruthlessly. Work on your plays long and hard before you get sucked into worrying about getting an agent, or submitting to theaters. Don't spend five years rewriting the same play. Attempt full-length plays. Always be working on something. Don't fool yourself into thinking that your screenplay or teleplay, with a little tweak, will work equally well onstage – or vice versa. Each medium has very different demands.
JMW: What are some of the common misconceptions about writing and mounting stage plays?
JM: That the audience, if it isn't responding to your work, is wrong. Harold Clurman famously said that, taken as individuals, the audience is always wrong, but taken collectively, they are always right. That talent will necessarily win out: a weak or outright bad play can, in the right collaborative hands, make for a captivating night in the theater. Conversely, a wonderful play can, in the wrong hands, suck onstage.
JMW: What's next for you as a writer?
JM: I have a book of stories almost ready to circulate, but as with Sugarless, they are edgy and very queer and probably a tough sell. I have another novel, very dear to my heart, called Love Slaves of Helen Hadley Hall. It needs another draft. There are also two adaptations of classic plays I'm interested in cooking up, for tens of dollars, because I still love to be in the rehearsal room.
That’s all the Book Buzz for now. So, go read a book!
John Morgan Wilson’s most recent short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and BestGay Stories of 2009 (Lethe Press). John is also the author of the Benjamin Justice novels, which have won an Edgar from Mystery Writers of America and three Lambda Literary Awards for best gay men’s mystery. Bold Strokes Books has reissued John’s early Justice mysteries, including his 1996 Edgar winner, Simple Justice. Spider Season (St. Martin’s Minotaur) is the eighth and latest in the series. You can read the first chapter at www.johnmorganwilson.com.
November 2009
Funny Boy Films (Latter Days, Adam & Steve) is developing Neil Miller's Sex-Crime Panic: A Journey to the Paranoid Heart of the 1950s, the true story of the 1955 round-up and institutionalization of gay men as sex offenders in Sioux City, Iowa, following the sex slayings of two local children. Actor-director Peter Paige (Say Uncle, Leaving Barstow) is set to direct, from a screenplay by David A. Lee and Daniel Vaillancourt.
Gina Daggett, the Lipstick half of Curve Magazine's long-running Lipstick & Dipstick column, has sold her first novel to Bella Books. Entitled Jukebox, it’s about debutantes, love – and debutantes in love. It won’t be out until next year but you can see the trailer now at www.ginadaggett.com.
Alyson Books has launched its new monthly newsletter, featuring an interview with Christopher Bram about his new nonfiction collection, Mapping the Territory, and a video trailer with adult film star Aiden Shaw tied to his new book, Sordid Truths: Selling My Innocence for a Taste of Stardom, a prequel to his memoir, My Undoing. To view or subscribe, go to http://enews.alyson.com/newsletter/alyson/20091028.html.
The prolific Patricia Nell Warren (The Front Runner) is now blogging regularly at the Huffington Post and the Bilerico Project. To learn what else she’s up to – including a virtual how-to seminar on self-publishing – check out the Book Buzz Interview below.
On Saturday, November 21, Giovanni’s Room and the Lambda Literary Foundation will host a Read-a-thon fundraiser to benefit Philadelphia’s struggling LGBT bookstore and LLF. Twenty authors will read from their works, answer questions, and sign books. Lambda board member Scott Cranin organized the event, which starts at 7:30 p.m. For more information, visit www.giovannisroom.com.
Playwright James Magruder’s first novel, Sugarless, a tale of adolescent sexual awakening, has been named one of "20 Indies to Watch" by Publishers Weekly and is a November selection of Insight/Out. James created a trailer for the book, which you can view on the “About” page at www.jamesmagruder.com.
Christopher Rice (www.christopherricebooks.com/) traveled to Thailand and environs to do research for his next novel, The Moonlit Earth. This fifth novel from Chris is a thriller about a young woman from Southern California caught up in danger and intrigue in Southeast Asia after her gay flight attendant brother is implicated there in a horrific terrorist act. Look for it this spring from Scribner.
Bosom Friends (http://bosomfriends.wordpress.com/), the sister site to Speak Its Name (www.speakitsname.wordpress.com), is now open for reviews of lesbian historical fiction. Meanwhile, Speak Its Name is running an "Advent Calendar Event" in December to celebrate the gay historical review blog's second birthday, and gay historical authors are being encouraged to sign up for the event. If you’d like your book reviewed at either site, contact Erastes at www.erastes.com.
Poetic Voices Without Borders 2, edited by Robert L. Giron and designed by Ken Schellenberg, has won the USA Book News 2009 National Best Book Award for Fiction & Literature: Anthologies. Gival Press (www.givalpress.com) is the publisher. Here’s the awards link: http://www.usabooknews.com/2009bestbooksawards.html.
Kathleen Warnock interviewed about a dozen emerging and established playwrights across the country for an article about the lesbian theatre scene for GO Magazine. Here’s the link: http://www.gomag.com/article/dyke_drama/.
The Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in association with the Marigny Theatre Corporation and the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival has announced a playwright’s contest. For details, go to: http://sasfest.org/fourth-annual-full-length-playwriting-contest
On the same note, the 24th Annual Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival is set for March 24-28 2010. The deadline for entries in the playwriting competition – November 1 – has already passed, but there’s still time to meet the November 16 deadline for submitting to the fiction writing competition. Prizes include $1,500, a reading, and publication. For more information, go to www.tennesseewilliams.net.
Bella Books is planning its second Y Tour for Fort Lauderdale over the February 14 Valentine's weekend, gathering lesbian authors to advance awareness of lesbian literature in the Fort Lauderdale area. For details, go to http://tinyurl.com/BellaYTourFL.
After a long hiatus, BLOOM – queer fiction, art, poetry and more – is back. Publisher Charles Flowers is reading manuscripts and planning a small online issue in January, followed by a print issue (BLOOM #6) in April. To see guidelines and sign up for the newsletter and updates, go to www.artsinbloom.com.
Bold Strokes Books has made two acquisitions that will launch new series: Winter Pennington’s mystery, Witch Wolf, for BSB Aeros, the first novel in the Kassandra Lyall Preternatural Investigator Series; and Lea Santos’s Little White Lie, the first in the Matinee Romance series, Amigas y Amor. Both books are due out next year.
Tim Lawrence, author of the acclaimed history of disco, Love Saves the Day, has revamped his website (www.timlawrence.info/), in tune with the publication of his latest book, Hold on to Your Dreams (Duke University Press). The biography of gay musician Arthur Russell has been earning strong reviews from Bookforum, The Wire, Library Journal, Time Out New York, and other publications.
Fay Jacobs has an expansive piece, “The Gaying of Rehoboth,” in the October issue of Delaware Beach Life (www.delawarebeachlife.com/), charting the long history of the gay community in the gay-friendly resort of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Fay is expanding the article into a book that she plans to publish through her own A&M Books.
Charlie Vázquez interviews Trebor Healey in the current edition of Ambiente about Treb’s writing, including his new story collection, A Perfect Scar. You can read it at http://www.ambiente.us/09009Trebor.html.
Finalists have been announced in the first Rainbow Awards competition, established by Elisa Rolle to recognize excellence in LGBT fiction. You can check it all out at http://elisa-rolle.livejournal.com/850354.html.
Redheaded males often get short shrift as desirable figures in fiction, but author Perry Brass confesses to a near-obsession with them. There’s also a blog, Gingerhead Man, devoted to them, and it’s promoting the Smashwords edition of Perry’s Warlock, a Novel of Possession, a dark tale about a dominant alpha male’s erotic encounter with a beautiful redheaded stranger. Here’s the link: http://ponyurl.com/6mnqb5.
Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla (www.GhalibDhalla.com), author of Ode to Lata, is the featured subject in a big spread in the current Bombay Dost (www.bombaydost.co.in/), the largest LGBT publication in Bombay, India. Ghalib’s next novel, The Two Krishnas, is due out from Alyson Books in February.
The Erotic Authors Association (www.eroticauthorsassociation.com) is open this month only for membership applications. For details, check the membership pages.
Sales of the classic self-help book, Loving Someone Gay, by Don Clark, Ph.D. have passed the 200,000 mark and will surely continue with a new, fifth edition from Lethe Press (www.lethepressbooks.com).
Speaking of Lethe Press, Best Gay Stories 2009 is now available after some production delays and publisher Steve Berman is reading for Best Gay Stories 2010. You can alert him to quality gay male essays and short fiction published on-line or in print during the calendar year of 2009 at sberman8@yahoo.com. Also, the blog Fanboys of the Universe interviewed Steve about gay horror and his new magazine, Icarus. To see the podcast, go to www.fanboysoftheuniverse.com.
A diverse group of authors will gather November 4-7 for this year’s Atlanta Queer Literary Festival (www.atlqueerlitfest.com), including Staceyann Chin, Michael Montlack, Regie Cabico, Manil Suri, and Collin Kelley (whose debut novel, Conquering Venus, is just out – more info at www.collinkelley.com).
Fine on Acting: A Vision of the Craft by Howard Fine with Chris Freeman (Havenhurst Books) became the top-selling book in the acting/auditioning category on Amazon.com within two days of its release last month. Back Stage magazine started a four-part series of excerpts on Oct. 29. Fine (www.howardfine.com), who has directed on Broadway, is one of Hollywood’s top acting teachers.
Mystery writer Josh Lanyon's first foray into speculative fiction, Strange Fortune, got a thumbs up from Publisher’s Weekly (“a taut, energetic, and romantic tale”). It’s out this month from Blind Eye Books (http://www.blindeyebooks.com/strange.html).
Lesléa Newman, poet laureate of Northampton, MA, has initiated a project called "30 Poems in 30 Days" to raise money for Center for New Americans (www.cnam.org/ )
family literacy project. Poets are writing a poem a day this month, with sponsors pledging a monetary amount per poem. Anyone can participate. Here’s the link: http://www.northamptonartscouncil.org/view/web/id/7746/title/30_Poems_in_30_Days_Project_=.
Stephen Soucy reports that 90069: West Hollywood Stories, published by his Modernist Press (http://modernistpress.wordpress.com/), has hit a sales milestone: 2000 copies.
Perseverance Pays: When Don Weise was with now-defunct Carroll & Graf, he passed on a mystery submitted by Elliott Mackle (www.elliottmackle.com/) with a long and heartfelt note to the author. After considerable reflection, Elliot changed direction, wrote a military adventure novel, Captain Harding’s Six Day War, and submitted it to Alyson Books, where Don is now the publisher. Don bought it and it’s out this month.
Jack Fritscher has posted free pdfs of the entire text of his Lammy finalist Some Dance to Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982 at www.JackFritscher.com.
Damian Serbu’s website (www.DamianSerbu.com) is now up and running, just in time for the release of his new novel, The Vampire's Angel.
Web Digest Weekly interviewed Rick R. Reed about Mute Witness, his new "gay horror/crime/romance" about small town suspicion toward a gay father who's child has been abducted. Here's the link:
http://www.facebook.com/l/24b75;www.webdigestweekly.com/Spotlight.html. WDW is also running the first four chapters of the novel (one each week) through November. Check it out at http://www.facebook.com/l/24b75;www.webdigestweekly.com/Fiction.html.
Finally: Thanks to Scott Cranin, Book Buzz is now accessible through his popular gay video website, www.TLAgay.com. The interview section of Book Buzz is carried by WeHo News (www.wehonews.com), West Hollywood’s online newspaper, published by Ryan Gierach. If your organization or website would like to spread this column’s reach with a link that also includes a link to the nonprofit Lambda Literary Foundation, please contact interim executive director Tony Valenzuela at info@lambdaliterary.org.
And now, the Book Buzz Interview, with Patricia Nell Warren:
 Patricia Nell Warren grew up on a ranch in Montana, spent many years working in the New York media, and has lived and traveled extensively in Europe. Her first novel, The Last Centennial, was published in 1971 but it was her second, the gay classic The Front Runner, that established her name when it was published by William Morrow in 1974. Six novels followed: The Fancy Dancer (1976), The Beauty Queen (1978), One Is the Sun (1991), Harlan’s Race (1994), Billy’s Boy (1996), and The Wild Man (2001). Patricia published the latter three on her own through Wildcat Press, which she co-owns. Wildcat also published her latest, the nonfiction The Lavender Locker Room (2001). She now lives in Los Angeles, where she writes fiction and political commentary and is active in various social and political causes.
JMW: Tell us about The Front Runner, why you wrote it and how it changed your life.
PNW: From 1969 into the early 1970s, I was active in long-distance running in the Northeast, one of a group of women who battled the AAU to change its discriminatory policies on women's running. These experiences acquainted me with a few closeted athletes and coaches, and birthed the idea of a novel about LGBT athletes going for the gold – a radical subject in those days! Originally I planned a story about a lesbian coach and her female Olympian, but abandoned that idea when I realized that the story would seem more fantasy than reality, since there were no women track coaches in those days. So I re-cast with a gay male protagonist, Coach Harlan Brown, and his male runner, 22-year-old Billy Sive.
By then the book industry was looking for LGBT-themed fiction, so I had no trouble finding a publisher for The Front Runner. The book came out in spring 1974 from William Morrow, and shortly got on the New York Times bestseller list. During that period, my life definitely went into radical change! I divorced my husband, got out of the closet myself, came out at my employer (The Reader's Digest), began publishing other books (The Fancy Dancer, The Beauty Queen), and by 1980 was able to become an independent, self-supporting author.
JMW: Why did you decide later to self-publish The Front Runner and other titles?
PNW: In the 1980s I started having disputes with publishers. The biggest issues were around creative control and accountability on royalties. Book publishing had quietly gotten as corrupt as the film business where back-end payments were concerned. By the early 1990s, when I discovered that The Front Runner's current paperback publisher had lied to me on royalty statements, cheating me of many tens of thousands on royalties, I had had enough.
By then I was living in Los Angeles and working on the first sequel to TFR, namely Harlan's Race. So I teamed up with L.A. media specialist Tyler St. Mark, and we started our own publishing company, Wildcat Press. Harlan's Race (hardcover) was our first title, and it stayed on the Lambda bestseller list for almost a year. In 1996 we launched our paperback line with The Fancy Dancer, The Beauty Queen and other titles. In 1997, we followed up with Billy's Boy, the second TFR sequel, and The Wild Man, both of them big sellers as well. In 2006, Wildcat branched into nonfiction, with The Lavender Locker Room, my collection of profiles on LGBT sports greats throughout history.
Meanwhile, my last novel with a trade house (Random House/Ballantine in 1991) had gone out of print with them, so I got the rights reverted and published One Is the Sun in a Wildcat edition. This is a "non-gay" story, based on real events and people in early-day Montana, about a great mixed-blood woman chief.
I've never seen myself as an author who writes exclusively about the "LGBT experience." In my opinion, there's a "social ecology" where every issue is tied to every other issue. So our Wildcat book list has already diversified and will continue to move into other areas. For instance, I'm very interested in Western history, being a born Montanan who grew up on a historic ranch and has a mixed-blood family heritage. I've written articles about the part of LGBT people in that history, and about other aspects of Western history as well.
I doubt that contracts with a big mainstream publisher would give me this kind of flexibility and creative control over my evolving body of work.
JMW: For potential self-publishers out there, how does your business operate?
PNW: Because of the high cost of office space, most small publishers today have their corporate office in a residential venue. Wildcat Press does the same things that a big publisher does, only on a smaller scale. Our in-house staff is tiny, just three or four. We rely on independent contractors for certain jobs (cover graphics, typesetting, bookkeeping and taxes, legal review, etc.) We create and design our own books, and contract the printing of long runs to a local job house, Delta Printing Solutions in Valencia, CA. Delta has been great to work with, and give the best prices we've ever gotten on long runs. (For us, "long" is 3,000-5,000 copies). Most inventory is in warehouse storage near Delta, though we keep enough stock at our shipping department to fill orders. UPS picks up there. Long runs are still the best way to get a low unit cost on a book.
But right now Wildcat is moving into print on demand (POD), printing only pre-ordered books, in an effort to eliminate storage costs from our overhead. We do our POD with Printmedia in Anaheim. POD books used to look a little cheesy, but the technology has now improved to the point where paperbacks off a digital press can be equal in quality to the best six-color jobs coming off the conventional presses.
Our titles are distributed through standard gay-friendly distributors like Baker & Taylor, Bookazine and the gay distributor, ASP Wholesale. We also sell direct to Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble, and some bookstores. Customers can buy directly from us through our website at www.wildcatpress.com.
JMW: Since anyone can self-publish, without any process to screen out substandard writing, self-publishing in general has a bad rap. Is this fair, and how do you rise above it?
PNW: This is a good question. First of all, it's important to distinguish between legitimate self-publishing and "vanity publishing." Many people confuse the two things, and that's where part of the bad rap comes from. Some of the so-called "vanity publishers" have existed since the 1800s; others came on scene more recently. These are companies that supposedly provide a "publishing service" to any author who comes along, regardless of how substandard the book might be. They charge an arm and a leg to publish some desperate author's manuscript, and they don't always deliver on their promises to get the book distributed and publicized. I once did the arithmetic for a writer who approached me for advice on a vanity contract offer he had gotten. He would be paying $40 a copy to have his book produced.
But real self-publishing is when an author undertakes to personally organize the publishing project, and get the book into the marketplace, via his or her own efforts and expense. So, instead of having the "vanity middleman" produce your book for you, so they get to build their own profit into the budget, you do without the middleman. You contract directly with the book designer, typesetter, copy editor and printer yourself, as well as with wholesalers and distributors. I.e. you do it all yourself.
As a legitimate avenue, self-publishing has been around for a long time. Check the Self-Publishing Hall of Fame (http://www.bookmarket.com/selfpublish.html) for the long list of illustrious American authors, past and present, who published their own work. When I was a kid, the book that first inspired me to identify with powerful same-sex attractions was T. E. Lawrence's great war memoir, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which he self-published after World War I. He designed his own book and dealt with the printer himself. SPOW appeared in a trade edition only after his death.
Sometimes a self-publishing effort blossoms into a small press that publishes other authors' work as well. Today's self-publishing has been carried to a historic new level with the advent of desktop technology and, more importantly, with the print industry's trend to digital and the Internet's introduction of e-books. Stephen King helped show the way a number of years ago when he offered his new novel online, chapter by chapter. As such, the new tech offers a new pathway into the marketplace for authors who have good writing to offer, but who can't (or don't want to) publish on the "establishment" track.
In our own genre, it's especially silly to look down on self-publishing, since some of our early LGBT literature came out of small presses started by authors who published their own work, such as Felice Picano's SeaHorse Press.
Back to your comment about the bad rap. It is true that some self-published books are badly written, badly edited and badly produced. This is because some authors lack professional experience in the book business. They have no idea how to find the right printer, or design a book cover that sells the book. They also lack the ability to look at their work critically, so they don't see that the book might need a rewrite badly, or maybe just a solid copy edit.
How do self-publishing authors rise above this? They need to do everything possible to educate themselves about what they're getting into – to ensure that their book is a professional creation that can compete with other professionally produced books in the marketplace. This could include getting professional help, like hiring a good book designer or editor.
JMW: Self-publishing and self-marketing is notoriously a money-losing proposition, but some do it successfully. What does it take?
PNW: First and foremost, self-publishing takes a lot of work, plus a lot of self-education in areas where one might be lacking. When I started Wildcat Press, I didn't know a thing about the wholesale end of the business! Fortunately, because of my twenty years at The Reader’s Digest, I did have experience in book design, editing, even manufacturing. So that helped get Wildcat off to a good start.
I do agree that self-publishing is often "money-losing" – but this is mostly because of the relentless economic arithmetic involved. This arithmetic affects everybody, big and small. Book publishing is like farming: It tends to have very narrow profit margins! The product is expensive to produce, in ratio to a retail price that the market will bear. And the trade has some entrenched policies and practices that don't make any sense. "Unlimited returns," for instance – it hurts when a publisher has to give a distributor full credit for books that are returned damaged. The trade clings obsessively to returns the way Republicans cling to abstinence-only!
But the economic quirks of publishing do have a greater potential to hurt the small operator. Overhead is a killer. With books, everything comes down to unit cost. The cost of printing, especially the price of paper, is probably the biggest bombshell in unit cost. But the small publisher has to compete, price-wise, with the big publisher on retail prices of books. And the big publisher can negotiate huge discounts from its printer because they order millions of copies every year. So a paperback book retailing at $25.00 from Wildcat Press might cost us $3.00 a copy to print. If that same book was retailing at $25.00 from Simon & Schuster, it might cost only $1 a unit to print, because of printer discounts. Out of that $25.00, a publisher gets to keep only 45%, or $11.25, since the standard distributor share is 55%. If $3 of that $11.25 goes to printing, that leaves the publisher only $8.25 to put towards storage, shipping, bookkeeping, promotion, utilities, phones, etc.
When all the bills are paid, a self-publishing author might be lucky to have fifty cents of net profit. So overhead problems can rapidly push a small publisher into the red ink.
"Print on demand" has become popular because it's a new technology that helps to eliminate not only the storage costs, but also the big outlay of cash for a long run on a web press. This is still the cheapest way to print books. But at $3 a copy for 3000 copies, you have to shell out $9000 up front. POD is problematic in its own way because the unit cost of a book off a digital press is usually higher than for conventional printing. So you can order a short run of 200 POD books and fill your current orders without warehousing the books, but those books might cost you $5 a copy to print. So on the short term, you've paid only $1000 for a new printing. But over the long haul, POD may not help you decrease your overhead.
One reason why e-books have come on so strong is that they're a way of getting around the high production cost of hard-copy books. But the jury is still out on whether the e-books marketplace is going to be a major one.
Of course there are ways for the self-publishing author to find extra income. One way is to maximize your subsidiary rights sales. Book clubs, audio books, foreign rights, anthologies, film and TV rights sales, etc. But you have to work hard to market all these and make this pay off.
Another strategy for publishers to stay in the black is mergers and buy-outs. Every major U.S. mainstream publisher is now owned by a bigger corporate entity, except for Kensington, which is still independent. Buyouts have happened in LGBT publishing too. Notably with Alyson Books, which has changed hands several times and is now owned by Regent Entertainment Media, Inc.
Some self-publishing authors fight costs by organizing into collectives. Then there's the nonprofit route via a 501-c3, which has kept Calyx afloat for many years. Calyx is one of the notable survivors among the women's presses.
Last but not least, some self-publishing authors just throw up their hands and forget about doing it as a business. Keeping their books in print is a labor of love, and they support it with a day job or career.
JMW: What are the greatest challenges and pitfalls for a self-published author?
PNW: I get a lot of "please help me" phone calls from authors who are thinking about self-publishing. For most, the greatest challenge is all that legwork and self-education they will need to do as they launch. Many have no idea what they're getting into. I was lucky to start out in self-publishing with all the experience I got during my 20 years at Reader's Digest – in book design, editing and the actual manufacturing process.
Often the biggest pitfall is lack of knowledge about the distribution end of the business. And the marketplace is going through a huge restructuring, what with the advent of the Internet, e-books and closing of so many brick-and-mortar bookstores. Indeed, many of the distributors and wholesalers that were still around in the early '90s (when Wildcat started up) have gone into bankruptcy, including key firms like Inland, BookPeople and PGW, who all supported small presses so strongly.
Another pitfall is getting involved with some of the dubious agents and "publishing services" out there. The website Preditors & Editors (www.anotherrealm.com/preditors/)
is a good consumer resource for finding out which ones to avoid.
JMW: Does Wildcat Press look at submissions and publish other writers?
PNW: At the moment, we don't publish other writers. However, I occasionally do consulting and editing on other writers' books.
JMW: You've written poetry, short fiction, novels, articles and essays. Do you have a favorite and do you still work in all these formats?
PNW: From the 1960s into the 1980s, I was pretty focused on poetry and fiction. But during the 1980s, I started writing nonfiction, historical articles and editorials. In 2006 I published my first nonfiction title, The Lavender Locker Room.
It's hard to say which is my favorite. I do love all these genres. Each appeals to me for different reasons. I will continue to mine away at all of them – blogging at Bilerico Project and Huffington Post even as I'm working on a new novel, The Wrong Side of the Tracks, and also possibly a final sequel in the Front Runner series.
JMW: If you could offer advice to aspiring or struggling writers out there, what would it be?
PNW: This is a tough time for both new writers and veterans. All the more reason to believe in your own work, and tell your stories with a passion that will touch other people's minds and hearts. Books have been around for thousands of years, and they've already moved across several big technological horizons. In spite of TV and Internet popularity, I don't see books vanishing anytime soon.
That’s all the Book Buzz for now. So, go read a book!
John Morgan Wilson’s most recent short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Best Gay Stories of 2009 (Lethe Press). John is also the author of the Benjamin Justice novels, which have won an Edgar from Mystery Writers of America and three Lambda Literary Awards for best gay men’s mystery. Bold Strokes Books has reissued John’s early Justice mysteries, including his 1996 Edgar winner, Simple Justice. Spider Season (St. Martin’s Minotaur) is the eighth and latest in the series. You can read the first chapter at www.johnmorganwilson.com.
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October 2009
The Saints and Sinners GLBT Literary Festival (http://sasfest.org/) has solved its website issues and is online again, with details about next year’s festival (May 13-16) and its First Annual Short Fiction Contest, sponsored with Queer Mojo, the Rebel Satori imprint. The deadline for the short fiction competition is January 2.
Radclyffe – AKA Len Barot – has signed on to edit Best Lesbian Romance 2011 for Cleiss Press, with April 1 the submission deadline. Here’s the guidelines link: http://radfic.com/BEST%20LESBIAN%20ROMANCE%202011.pdf.
EZTV (www.eztvmedia.com), created in 1979 as a production company and exhibition venue for feature-length works created on video, has filmed Michael Kearns’ stage production of Dream Man. On December 2, the day after World AIDS Day, it will be part of “The Drama of AIDS,” an evening at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives (www.onearchives.org/), benefiting ONE’s AIDS History Project.
A&M Books has acquired The Carousel, a debut novel by Stefani Deoul, a veteran film and TV producer, who is now at work on her next book. Look for The Carousel and its cast of strong female characters next year.
Gregory Gerard’s debut “memoir/mystery,” In Jupiter's Shadow, achieved a #24 rank in Amazon's Top 100 Bestsellers in Memoir in one-day sales. If you’re interested in his marketing strategy, it’s outlined at www.JupitersShadow.com/reviews.html.
Raymond Luczak, author of Assembly Required: Notes from a Deaf Gay Life (RID Press) and editor of Eyes of Desire 2: A Deaf GLBT Reader (Handtype Press), has just posted two new subtitled clips in which he talks about writing the four full-length plays in his new collection, Whispers of a Savage Sort and Other Plays about the Deaf American Experience (Gallaudet University Press). You can view the clips at http://www.raymondluczak.com/whispers/whispersclips.html.
Spinsters Ink has nominated Mary Carroll Moore's new coming-of-age novel, Qualities of Light, a crossover title for both YA and adult readers, for a PEN/Faulkner award.
Playwright James Magruder's debut novel, Sugarless, was included in a recent Publisher’s Weekly piece on promising fall titles from independent presses. You can read the article at (http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6686607.html). For more on James’ 1970s coming-of-age novel, go to http://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/4644.htm.
Bold Strokes Books will be highly visible during Women’s Week in Provincetown October 9-18, with BSB events posted at www.boldstrokesbooks.com/events.html. For those who can’t attend, Now Voyager Books will arrange to get you signed copies and ship the books to you. Contact Mark Leach at NowVoyagerBook@aol.com.
Meanwhile, BSB has announced several acquisitions, all due out next year: Kathryn Shay’s Liberty Edition novel, The Perfect Family; David-Matthew Barnes’s young adult novel, Mesmerized, from the BSB Soliloquy line; and Curtis Christopher Comer’s paranormal mystery, Midnight Whispers: the Blake Danzig Chronicle.
Emmanuel Xavier got some attention in a CNN.com piece on gay Latinos coming of age (http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/wayoflife/09/09/Latino.gay/). To see Xavier’s smiling mug, click on the second photo in the accompanying gallery of head shots.
Lambda Award-winning poet Ellen Bass (www.ellenbass.com) will teach two writing workshops November 13-15 at the legendary Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. To enroll, go directly to the Esalan website: www.esalan.org.
Kilian Melloy of Edge called Paul Bens' debut novel, Kelland (Casperian), "one of the most perplexing and rewarding novels you're likely to read." Killian’s interview with Paul is at www.edgeboston.com/index.php?ch=topics&tag_id=1156.
In lieu of submitting to publishers, Robin Anderson-Forbes has published his adventure novel, The Jolly Lobster: A Queer Nova Scotian Prohibition Era Tale, online at http://jollylobster.ca/. He’s hoping a publisher will show some interest.
Finally: Many thanks to Charles Flowers, whose term as executive director of the Lambda Literary Foundation is up. Charles helped launch Book Buzz, among his countless contributions to the LLF during his four-year term. Tony Valenzuela steps into the executive director position, at least temporarily, while Christopher Rice steps down as President of the Board of Trustees and Board member Katherine V. Forrest assumes that role. Joining the Board is Alyson Books publisher Don Weise. And let’s not forget Richard Labonté, who will administer the twenty-second cycle of the annual Lambda Literary Awards. I’ve been fortunate enough to know and work with most of these folks over the years, and I want to express my gratitude to all of them for their hard work and dedication to the LGBT writing and publishing community.
By the way, the Foundation’s address remains the same: 5482 Wilshire Blvd, #1595, Los Angeles, CA 90036. Direct e-mails should go to info@lambdaliterary.org. As always, financial support is badly needed.
And now, the Book Buzz Interview, with Edwin Hermance:
 Edwin Hermance is the owner of Giovanni’s Room (www.giovannisroom.com) in Philadelphia, one of the world’s venerable LGBT bookstores – founded in 1973 by Tom Wilson Weinberg, Bernie Boyle, and Dan Sherbo. Raised in Houston, Ed graduated from Dartmouth in 1962 with a B.A in philosophy and got his M.A. in comparative literature at Indiana University, Bloomington in 1965. After college teaching and managing a natural foods co-op, he bought Giovanni’s Room in 1976. Now 69, Ed manages to keep the store going with the remarkable support of his staff, customers, the LGBT community, and the city of Philadelphia. Giovanni’s Room (345 South 12th St., Philadelphia, PA 19107) is located at 12th and Pine in Philly’s “gayborhood.”
JMW: Like most independent bookstores, Giovanni's Room is struggling financially. What are you doing to survive?
EH: The homophobes saved this store in 1979 when new landlords threw us out of the old store because they couldn't stand having a queer store on their property and no one would rent to us on a major street. One landlord said bluntly, "You would attract too many homosexuals to our building." We hadn't considered buying a building because we didn't have any money, but as the eviction date drew near, we were forced to borrow the down payment money from our customers. Then more than 100 volunteers, including the architect, completely renovated the run-down building that has been our home ever since. If we didn't own this property, we would have folded years ago because the store could never afford the rent that such space now gets. Between 25% and 30% of our labor is volunteer. Salaries have always been low, but we do provide health insurance for full-timers. Our staff has, collectively, more than 100 years' experience in our specialties, LGBT books, movies, periodicals, and so on. Philadelphia has always supported this store. Now we’re in the midst of another fund-raising campaign – we need $55,000 – to rebuild the store’s deteriorated, two-story front wall.
JMW: Why are LGBT bookstores so important to the LGBT community?
EH: We are still just about the most visible LGBT establishment in the city. We are on a corner and have big display windows on two major streets. The city buses and the tour buses roll past here all day, every day. We set the example of being open about who we are and have been rewarded by the fact that no one has thrown a brick through a window in 15 years, though before then broken windows in the middle of the night were not rare. A person can come here and see just about every significant book published in our subject areas in the previous 12 months, and of course we have a few thousand older books as well. A person cannot create a Google search or any other online search that would come up with anything like what a person could survey here in five minutes – and you can actually pick up anything that interests you and look through it. Similarly with DVDs, we have the biggest inventory of non-porn LGBT films in the region, because we are satisfied if a film sells only one or two a year. We care enough about our specialties that we have films that, as far as I can learn, are not available in any other store in the country.
JMW: In recent years, I've seen fewer and fewer LGBT readers spending their money in LGBT bookstores. What do you think is behind this trend?
EH: With all the new media exploding around us, people don't have as much time to read as they used to. I think it's a terrifying development if people lose the benefits of an extended exposition of a subject. Subjects worth thinking about need to be developed in chapters and whole books; they can't be handled in a tweet or scribbling on somebody's blog. If you're tweeting and scribbling then you aren't reading and learning.
JMW: What impact have chain bookstores and Internet bookselling had on indie bookstores and LGBT authors?
EH: It seems like the chain stores have had their day. Borders is on the verge of bankruptcy, Barnes & Noble is closing its Walden Books subsidiaries as fast as they can. I remember 15 years ago that an author whose name you would know, after spending hundreds of hours browsing and reading in this store, gave her first reading of her first book at a nearby Borders – and none in this store – because the publisher's publicity department told her to. This is probably the only time in her life that she did something just because somebody told her to.
Similarly, when Amazon declassified tens of thousands of LGBT books as "adult" last winter, Lambda Literary's supine response of thanking Amazon for doing so is due to a lack of insight as to the nature of that company. You might as well thank a rock. Amazon did not reclassify all those books out of altruism; they did it because it was bad for business. I still don't understand why our side let Amazon get away with saying, first, that the adult label on all those books was a "computer glitch," then saying it was due to a "programming error," which of course are not explanations at all. About four years ago, with much fanfare in gay media, Amazon announced the opening of their “gay bookstore,” featuring first two bestseller lists, one purportedly of lesbian history titles, the other of gay history titles. A book by Gay Talese was included in the lesbian list. Three Christian-right anti-gay rants were on the lists. No book published in the previous four years was on either list. Gay books on the lesbian list and lesbian books on the gay list. It was a mess.
Of course, Amazon is happy if you spend hours developing bibliographies for them for free, but I hope the people who are giving so generously to an amoral corporation would please volunteer for us instead. Our website needs your help. The fact is that Amazon is trying to form a vertical monopoly – from author through to book buyer. I think in some cases they have sold below cost, a typical action for a would-be monopoly. Do LGBT authors and book buyers want to be dependent on a monopoly, especially one as indifferent to our needs as Amazon has demonstrated itself to be?
 JMW: Internet bookselling is now a fact of life. Where does Giovanni's Room fit into this brave new world?
EH: We have a steady online business. Our website, www.queerbooks.com, which is in the process of a major upgrade though it is accessible straight through, uses Ingram Book Co.'s database, so people can order any of some 2.4 million titles from us. We're hoping to recruit some more volunteers who would resume our online cataloging of subjects such as 2009 Black Gay Men's Literature and 2009 Young Adult Literature for Women. We have the materials to make the best bibliography of current literature in our specialties available online. We just don't have the people to do the data entry.
JMW: What can LGBT authors do to survive in the new publishing and bookselling environment? Any advice?
EH: Well, they shouldn't tell me a year or two after their book came out that they would like us to carry it and we can find out all about it on Amazon. Authors whose books are print on demand (POD) should consider at the beginning of the process if they want their books in bookstores. If they do, then they have to be sure it is available from at least one distributor (Bookazine, Ingram, ASP Wholesale, Baker & Taylor, Bella come to mind) and the distributor gets the discount they need to offer it to stores at 40% off. We're happy to get POD titles at 15% when someone orders them on our website, but we cannot afford to stock such books. Even at 40% it's rare that we deal directly with a publisher who has only a couple of books of interest to us. We just don't have the time. Otherwise, my advice is: Write great books! People like Don Weise (Alyson Books) and Faith Conlon (Seal Press) will publish you if you write a great book.
That’s all the Book Buzz for now. So, go read a book!
John Morgan Wilson’s most recent short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and BestGay Stories of 2009 (Lethe Press). John is also the author of the Benjamin Justice novels, which have won an Edgar Award from Mystery Writers of America and three Lambda Literary Awards for best gay men’s mystery. Bold Strokes Books has reissued John’s early Justice mysteries, including his 1996 Edgar winner, Simple Justice. Spider Season (St. Martin’s Minotaur) is the eighth and latest in the series. You can read the first chapter at www.johnmorganwilson.com.
September 2009
Book Buzz is a monthly column of news and noteworthy tidbits from the LGBT writing and publishing community. Book release announcements (pub dates) will continue to be covered elsewhere while Book Buzz looks for a different “angle” – an award, milestone, notable reissue, film deal, rave review, event of national interest, etc. Submit your brief item to John Morgan Wilson at jmwwriter@aol.com. No attachments please.
Congratulations to Sarah Schulman! She’s the recipient of the 2009 David R. Kessler Fellowship from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York. The fellowship recognizes a scholar, artist, and/or activist who has produced a substantive body of work that has significantly influenced GLBTQ studies. In related news, nonprofit The New Press (www.thenewpress.com/) will publish Sarah's latest book, Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences in November, and Arsenal Pulp will publish her new novel, The Mere Future, this month.
Chino Mayrina has won the 8th Annual Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award for his poem, “We Must Always Sing.” You can read it at www.givalpress.com. Honorable mentions went to Michael Montlack, Amanda Rachelle Warren, Jeff Walt, and Trish Cole.
This spring, the University of Wisconsin Press will publish Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s latest novel, The Big Bang Symphony, the interwoven stories of three women during an icebound season at a scientific station in Antarctica. Meanwhile, Lucy is winning myriad prizes for her short fiction, which we discuss with her in our Book Buzz Interview below.
Jeff Flaster is seeking submissions for a new magazine, Nowhere 2 Be Found, which will launch in January, focusing on diverse views and culture from a GLBTQ perspective. First issue nonfiction topics will include relationships, physical and mental health, physical challenges, and substance abuse issues. Fiction genres will include science fiction, horror and fantasy. Submission deadline is December 5. Direct inquiries to nowheretwobefound@gmail.com.
The first title in Lethe Press’s new Paragons of Queer Speculative Fiction series, which reprints classics from the genre, will also help fight breast cancer. Shadow Man, by Melissa Scott, also serves as a remembrance of Lisa Barnett, Scott's late partner and frequent co-author. It’s just been published and a donation for each book sold will go to the nonprofit Susan G. Komen for the Cure (http://ww5.komen.org/).
Eduardo Santiago's short story, "Bit by Bit," has been anthologized in zyzzyva's Best First Fiction in Print 1986-2009. To read all the selected stories, go to http://www.zyzzyva.org/fall09.htm.
The National Leather Association: International (http://www.nla-i.com/) has expanded its annual writing awards for excellence in pansexual SM/leather/fetish writing. Nominations are now being accepted for books, articles, novels, and short fiction first published between January 1, 2009 and December 31, 2009. The deadline for nominations, including self-nominations, is February 28. Winners will be announced this spring. For more details, contact Steve Vakesh at stvvakesh@comcast.net.
Bold Strokes Books has acquired Sophia Kell Hagin’s new romantic adventure novel, Whatever Gods May Be, scheduled for release next year.
Bella Books has signed two novelists who will make their debuts early next year with widely divergent stories of lesbian romance. Kate Christie's Solstice involves the contemporary struggle of two recent college grads trying to figure out what next, while Elizabeth Hart's historical Lily of the Tower tells the story of two women whose love is forbidden by Victorian mores and circumstances.
Jack Fritscher has made upgrades to his website (www.JackFritscher.com), including posting a free, printable pdf of his award-winning 2008 history, Gay San Francisco (Volume 1). Also posted are pre-publication texts of Gay San Francisco volumes 2 and 3, offered in transparency to anyone wishing to make corrections or additions.
Arktoi Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press, is seeking book-length submissions from lesbian poets for publication next year. For details, go to www.arktoi.com.
As if anyone needs reminding, Elizabeth Taylor was one of the first major celebrities to step up and be counted in the fight against AIDS, and William J. Mann recounts her vital role in the movement and much more in his new book, How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood, out next month from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Clifford Henderson (www.cliffordhenderson.net) has narrated the audio version of her novel, The Middle of Somewhere (Bold Strokes Books), which is now available at www.dogaraudio.com. Two installments of a video interview/promo she simultaneously produced can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YobGmmRktN8 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pH8vuubFiGo, with more to follow.
Terry Angel Mason, author of Love Won't Let Me Be Silent, a collection of nonfiction, short stories, and poems from gay and lesbian, African-American and urban perspectives, has added audio podcasts to his website at www.terryangelmason.com.
Laurie R. King (www.laurieking.com) has signed a new contract with Bantam for two more novels, to be published in 2011 and 2012, and reports that one might be a new Kate Martinelli mystery, featuring her resourceful lesbian San Francisco detective.
Patricia Nell Warren, who covers sports for the GLBT media, has been following the controversy surrounding South African teen track star Caster Semenya, whose gender is being investigated by the IAAF. To read Patricia’s first post on the subject, go to http://www.bilerico.com/2009/08/im_tracking_the_investigation_of.php#more.
Steven Bereznai’s new novel Queeroes got a nice review in the September issue of Instinct from Richard Labonte, who described it as "a witty and wicked hybrid of Heroes and Gossip Girl." To learn more, visit www.stevenbereznai.com.
Last month, Book Buzz reported that Rebel Satori Press (www.rebelsatori.com) had joined the Saints and Sinners GLBT Literary Festival to sponsor the First Annual Saints and Sinners Short Fiction Contest, with details and entry form at the festival website (www.sasfest.org). The S&S site is experiencing technical problems, so Rebel Satori has posted the info at www.queermojo.net.
For authors who live in West Hollywood, there’s still time to sign up for "West Hollywood Writes," a free opportunity for WeHo residents to sell their books at the eighth annual West Hollywood Book Fair on Sunday, October 4. For an application or more information visit http://www.westhollywoodbookfair.org/ or contact Elias Valencia at internevalencia@weho.org. The 9/4 deadline has been extended, so hurry.
Finally: My short story, “The Pull of the Current”, has been accepted by Stephen Soucy and his Modernist Press for a new collection, Art for Art. Due out next year, it features short fiction in which a work of art figures prominently in each story.
And now, the Book Buzz Interview, with Lucy Jane Bledsoe:
 San Francisco Bay Area resident Lucy Jane Bledsoe (www.lucyjanebledsoe.com) writes nonfiction as well as novels and short fiction. Her credits include a book of narrative nonfiction, The Ice Cave: A Woman’s Adventures from the Mojave to the Antarctic; three novels, Working Parts, This Wild Science, and Biting the Apple; and a collection of short fiction, Sweat: Stories and a Novella. Her recent short fiction won the 2009 Sherwood Anderson Fiction Prize, the 2009 Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, and the 2009 International Arts Movement Fiction Prize. Lucy has traveled to Antarctica three times – twice with the National Science Foundation’s Artists & Writers Fellowship program and once on the former Russian spy ship, the Akademik Sergey Vavilov – and is among a select few who have stayed at all three American stations there. Lucy’s latest novel, The Big Bang Symphony, will be published this spring.
JMW: How and why did you get into short story writing, where you’ve recently won some important and lucrative awards?
LJB: I began writing short stories in the 1990s when all those queer anthologies were being published. I love writing to assignment, and these themed anthologies were like assignments, giving me starting platforms. Then Seal Press, who published my first collection (Sweat, 1995), asked me to write a novel (Working Parts, 1997). I just kept writing novels after that. Then, a couple of years ago, inspired by sheer exhaustion, I decided to write short fiction for a while. The idea of finishing something in a couple of months, rather than in several years, was very appealing. So I did a kind of wild thing. I organized all these ideas I have for novels into one big electronic folder. I decided to “use up” the ideas by writing them into short stories. It’s been so liberating, not saving ideas, just spending them. The same exhaustion also propelled me toward wanting to find another way to support myself other than writing curriculum, children’s books, and teaching, all simultaneously while trying to find time to do what I really want to do, which is write fiction for adults. I thought maybe if I wrote some stuff in short form, I could send it out for fellowships or residencies. I have never felt able to find stand-alone excerpts from my novels for that purpose.
JMW: Who are some of the short fiction writers who have most inspired you and helped you grow?
LJB: The first short stories I fell in love with were Alice Walker’s, especially one called “The Welcome Table.” I love just about everything Alice Munro writes. She’s so good I can’t even say why she’s that good. I start reading a story thinking, I’m going to figure out what she’s doing here. But then I’m lost right away and I forget to think about what she’s doing, I’m just in the story. Anything by Sherman Alexie is wonderful. He’s incredibly evolved in his characters’ views of sexuality and general connectedness. He has one of the biggest literary hearts I know. I love short stories by Andrea Barrett, Ali Smith, and Grace Paley. Jewelle’ Gomez’s story, “Don’t Explain,” blows me away every time I read it. I just read and loved Yiyun Li’s The Vagrants, which is a novel, but it reads a little like a collection of short stories because it’s made up of a number of intertwined stories. Anne Enright’s novel, The Gathering, is brilliant, and I can’t wait to read her new collection of stories. I’m sure I’m forgetting any number of short story writers I love.
JMW: What are the challenges and rewards of short story writing versus the novel?
LJB: I can finish a short story so much more quickly than I can finish a novel. Which means I can get feedback much more quickly too, see it in print, hear what people think. I love how writing short fiction helps me think intensely about story. It’s a very concentrated form. I have to cut to the chase, and that too is liberating, striking every word that doesn’t do enough work. But I also love developing characters, and that’s one of the pleasures of novel-writing.
JMW: Do you work exclusively with lesbian themes or is your work broader?
LJB: I’ve written so many lesbian-themed stories – novels and short fiction – over the last 15 years. All my stories have included characters with other sexual identities, too. I like the challenge of writing diverse characters. Can I authentically get inside a straight man’s head? The head of a transgendered 13-year-old? What I love most about fiction, as opposed to nonfiction, is that it’s about imagination. I don’t think we as a culture celebrate imagination enough, how extraordinary it is that we can make these leaps into what we technically don’t know. It allows us to create things of beauty, but imagination is also crucial in helping us reach other people, go beyond who we are to connect to people completely different from ourselves.
I almost never write about sexual identity per se. While writing The Big Bang Symphony, my big breakthrough came when I finally realized one of the three main characters is straight! I had been pushing a lesbian identity down the poor woman’s throat. And just this week I realized a character who I thought was straight is in fact a not-yet-out lesbian. As I mature as a writer, it’s easier for me to get to know characters as they really are.
JMW: What's the short story market like out there for LGBT writers?
LJB: Poets & Writers has a good online list of literary journals that publish short fiction. Many of them accept work only at certain times of year. Most don’t pay. I do think it’s quite a bit harder to get queer stories published. At least my experience has been that my stories without queer content get accepted in straight publications more readily than my stories with queer content. A notable exception is ZYZZYVA, a fantastic journal that publishes stories by West Coast authors. Howard Junker, the editor, publishes lots of queer stories, including lots of lesbian ones. I’m finding there are rewards in publishing short fiction other than money. I hear from other writers, and occasionally from publishing professionals like agents, who like my stories. That kind of feedback gives me a big boost.
JMW: How does one get a collection of short fiction published?
LJB: This might be a better question for the editors reading this column. I don’t know how one gets a collection published. I think it’s a good idea to first publish as many of the stories individually, in journals, as possible. I’ve heard it helps if a story collection has a theme. I’m hoping to collect the stories I’ve been working on recently into a book. A lot of them are about negotiating intimacy in midlife. What is desire now? How does loss impact desire? The cultural assumption is that desire and passion are lessened with age, and I think the opposite is true. My characters explore these questions from different points of view, straight and gay and bi.
JMW: You seem to do well with awards and grants. How does one mine those areas?
LJB: For years I’ve felt annoyed at many of the grants and fellowships being offered to writers because you pretty much had to already be independently wealthy to have the time to apply for them. I could take a week off of work to apply for that $1000, or I could stay at work and make more money than the grant. I don’t think it’s really possible to “mine” anything in writing – unless you are the kind of writer who is doing it for the money and somehow manage to figure out what the next big thing is. I think “success” is a combination, maybe in equal parts, of hard work, talent, and luck. If you keep working as hard as you can, and you are writing good stories, eventually your stories will connect with an appreciative audience. But it might be a small audience! With grants and awards, it just takes some judges or panels who connect with what you’re doing, and that may or may not happen. Students hate when I talk this way. Everyone wants, to use one of our President’s favorite phrases, a silver bullet.
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JMW: Tell us about your novel, The Big Bang Symphony, due out in March.
LJB: It’s the story of three women – a galley cook, a geologist, and a composer – who have run away to jobs in Antarctica. Each hopes to get what she needs and to get out fast. But that continent is like a vortex. The place is so raw and pure, all seal hide and crystalline iceberg. The fishbowl communities at McMurdo and South Pole Stations jack all emotion up to a 10. As each of these three women falls in love, and also into trouble, they become increasingly involved in one another’s lives. There’ve been a bunch of books about the continent’s explorers and history, but nothing about the communities of people living there now. The Big Bang Symphony is about how Antarctica profoundly changes people.
That’s all the Book Buzz for now. So, go read a book!
John Morgan Wilson’s most recent short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and BestGay Stories of 2009 (Lethe Press). John is also the author of the Benjamin Justice novels, which have won an Edgar Award from Mystery Writers of America and three Lambda Literary Awards for best gay men’s mystery. Bold Strokes Books has reissued John’s early Justice mysteries, including his 1996 Edgar winner, Simple Justice. Spider Season (St. Martin’s Minotaur) is the eighth and latest in the series. You can read the first chapter at www.johnmorganwilson.com.
August 2009
Publisher Don Weise continues to revamp and expand venerable Alyson Books (www.alysonbooks.com), with a new true crime series, classics imprint, and Sister Spit, a new lesbian imprint edited by Michelle Tea. For a more extensive look at what’s happening with Alyson, see our Book Buzz Interview with Don further down.
Out is honoring Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, and Edmund White, three founding members of the pioneering Violet Quill writing and publishing circle, as part of the magazine’s Out 100 Awards in this anniversary year of Stonewall.
Now in its fifth year, The Golden Crown Literary Society, which recognizes writing for and about lesbians, has honored Lee Lynch with its 2009 Trailblazer Award. Sherry Mills picked up the GCLS Director’s Award. Goldies went to nearly two dozen authors and editors and more than a dozen publishers in twelve categories. To view all the winners, go to http://www.gclscon.com/2009Winners.htm.
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Johnny Diaz again blurs fiction and reality in his gay-themed mystery, Beantown Cubans, just out from Kensington: "The stories that Tommy Perez covers in Beantown Cubans and in my first novel, Boston Boys Club, are stories I've actually covered,” Johnny tells us. “It allows me to pay tribute to my real-life job as a reporter. And for readers, it’s kind of an inside joke."
Lucy Jane Bledsoe (www.lucyjanebledsoe.com) has just won the Sherman Anderson Foundation Fiction Award, which carries a $15,000 prize, for a collection of her short fiction. If that’s not enough, she also won the 2009 Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction for her short story, “Girl with Boat.” In addition to a $1,000 prize, she receives a trip to Georgia to read the story and to visit Andalusia, Flannery O’Connor’s home farm.
Taking Woodstock, Elliot Tiber’s gay-themed memoir of his life-changing involvement in the legendary 1969 music festival, written with Tom Monte, is now a film directed by Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain). Coinciding with its August 28 release is the publication of Taking Woodstock: the Shooting Script (Newmarket Press), which includes the James Shamus screenplay, production notes, and film and historical photos.
Rebel Satori Press (www.rebelsatori.com) has joined the Saints and Sinners GLBT Literary Festival to sponsor the First Annual Saints and Sinners Short Fiction Contest, with a $250 grand prize and two $50 second place prizes. The top stories will be published in an anthology from Rebel's QueerMojo imprint. More information is available at www.sasfest.org, including details on next year’s festival.
United Stages (www.unitedstages.com) has published new editions of three notable plays by Doric Wilson, the iconic gay playwright, stage director and producer: And He Made a Her, Now She Dances, and Street Theater. Meanwhile, the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (www.athe.org) has honored Wilson and Judith Malina with its 2009 Career Achievement Awards for Professional Theatre.
Lethe Press is introducing a new series, Paragons of Queer Speculative Fiction, which will reprint prime examples of LGBT fantasy, horror, and science-fiction. Proceeds of the book sales will help the Gaylactic Network (www.gaylacticnetwork.org), a national organization that supports similar genre literature of particular interest to LGBT readers. The first seriestitle, out next month, will be Melissa Scott’s Shadow Man.
While we’re speculating, please note that Gaylaxicon (www.gaylaxicon2009.org), the annual LGBT international science fiction, fantasy, horror and comics convention, will be held October 9-11 in Minneapolis.
Bella Books has acquired Two Weeks in August, a first novel by Nat Burns (http://www.natalieburns.net/), already well-known to lesbian music fans for her monthly column "Nat's Notes" in Lesbian News. She’s also won awards for her poetry, plays, short stories and articles.
Bold Strokes Books (www.boldstrokesbooks.com) has also announced several acquisitions: PJ Trebelhorn’s new romance, From This Moment On, Kristin Marra’s new novel of romantic intrigue novel, Wind and Bones, and Rebecca S. Buck’s new Victory Editions novel, Truths. All are due out next year.
Cheyenne Publishing (http://cheyennepublishing.com/) brings back three memorable titles in reprint this month: Frost Fair, by Erastes, and two Lee Rowan novels, Ransom and Winds of Change.
Kensington author Frank Anthony Polito (Band Fags!, Drama Queers!), makes his film acting debut as a transsexual juror in One Angry Man, a courtroom comedy inspired by Twelve Angry Men, starring comedian Jackie Mason. Look for it later this year.
Meryl Cohn, AKA "Ms. Behavior," author and syndicated queer advice columnist, is very much in the spotlight this month. Her play, "And Sophie Comes Too," will open August 15 in FringeNY (www.fringenyc.org), presented by TOSOS Theater (www.tosos2.org). And Meryl’s "The Siegels of Montauk" will get a staged reading at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) conference on August 10. She’s also the winner of the 2009 Jane Chambers Award, which recognizes feminist plays and performance texts created by women writers with significant female roles, given in memory of lesbian playwright Jane Chambers.
Lesléa Newman joins the faculty of the inaugural Kinship Writers Retreat at the Rolling Green Conference Center in Andover, MA September 25-27, along with Andre Dubus III, Hester Kaplan and others. For details, go to www.kinshipwriters.org.
The dramatic narrative of James Cihlar’s latest poetry collection, Undoing (Little Pear Press) impressed reviewer Ryan Vine in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Here's a link: http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/books/46415597.html?page=2&c=y.
Patricia Nell Warren, troubled that the media largely ignored pop idol Michael Jackson’s long struggle with lupus, a painful autoimmune disease, until his death, blogged about it at Bilerico.com (www.bilerico.com). Why Patricia’s concern? She saw a close friend suffer with lupus for twenty-five years before passing on, and wanted to increase public awareness about this debilitating disease.
Finally: St. Martin’s Minotaur has decided not to renew my contract for more novels in the Benjamin Justice mystery series. So, after an Edgar and three Lambda Literary Awards, it looks like Spider Season, the eighth in the series, will probably be the last. (Not that I didn’t see this coming and write Spider Season accordingly.)
On the brighter side, I’ll have a short story in the new edition of Best Gay Stories (Lethe Press), due out later this month. Jameson Currier, Craig Gidney, Rhys Hughes, Jeff Mann, and Sam J. Miller are among the other writers included. Lethe Press Publisher Steve Berman, who began the series last year, also edits Wilde Stories, an annual anthology reprinting the best in gay speculative fiction.
I’ve also got a story in the September/October double issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, apparently the first take on the vampire genre ever to run in EQMM. So the writing life goes on.
And now, the Book Buzz Interview, with Don Weise:
 A legendary name in gay publishing, Don Weise is the publisher at Alyson Books (www.alysonbooks.com), the largest publisher specializing in LGBT titles. Don entered the book business in 1993 in the San Francisco Bay Area with Publishers Group West, a distributor. He later moved to Cleis Press, where, as associate editor, he acquired his first book, Gore Vidal: Sexually Speaking. When Don moved to New York in 2003, his work and growing friendship with Edmund White helped open doors in the LGBT literary world. For four years, until its demise in 2008, Don served as senior editor at Carroll & Graf, where he developed one of the most vibrant lines of LGBT literature ever, working with such authors as John Rechy, James Purdy, Samuel R. Delany, Edward Albee, Leslie Feinberg, E. Lynn Harris, Andrew Holleran, Kate Clinton, Bob Smith, Cheryl Clarke, Marijane Meaker, Charles Busch, Michelangelo Signorile, Keith Boykin, and Michael Musto, as well as scores of new and previously unpublished writers. Don has been involved in virtually every area of book publishing – sales, marketing, publicity, editing, production, even design – but has also found time to be involved in various areas of social and political activism.
JMW: When and how did you land at Alyson?
DW: I arrived last November, when I was recruited by the press’ new owner, Regent Media. I brought with me more than 15 year’s worth of experience and contacts in the LGBT publishing world, which I wasted no time putting to good use. I’d like to think our current catalog speaks to that rich background.
JMW: Why Alyson, and not another company?
DW: Alyson is the largest and oldest publisher of LGBT literature, so I can’t think of a press that’s better suited to my background nor can I think of another editor better suited to putting the press back on its feet and leading it into the future. In fact, given my career history it’s a wonder I didn’t land here sooner.
JMW: In what areas is Alyson Books publishing now?
DW: For decades Alyson has been well known for its mysteries, commercial fiction, humor and erotica, not to mention beloved classics like Heather Has Two Mommies, B-Boy Blues, and Stone Butch Blues. We’ll continue publishing in these popular categories, but at the same time I’ve made a significant shift in our program toward more substantial titles. For example we’re now publishing top authors like Christopher Bram, Edmund White, Paul Russell, Judy Grahn, and Frank Browning. We’re also covering current affairs with Mel White’s Holy Terror, a book about the threat of the Christian Right, and Eric Alva’s Once a Marine, his account of being the first casualty in the Iraq war and battling “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Another area I’m excited about is our true crime series, which launches with Fred Rosen’s Body Count, a book that follows the murder trail of the third most proficient serial killer in U.S. history, who happens to be gay. Then next spring there’s David McConnell’s Gay Panic: Stories of Straight Men Who Kill the Gay Men Who Love Them.
I’m thrilled also to be partnering with Michelle Tea in our new Sister Spit series of books, which she’ll series-edit from her extraordinary ranks of performers. Lastly, Alyson is publishing Henry James (surely the first time those words have been used in the same sentence), inaugurating our classics imprint next season with The Bostonians, followed by Melville’s Billy Budd. Unlike the many lost and unknown gay classics that are reissued from time to time, our series will publish the biggest titles in the canon, only with a queer twist in the introduction and packaging. Most people wouldn’t think of The Bostonians as gay, for example, but some call it the first lesbian novel ever published. That’s the approach we’ll be taking with this series – reclaiming queer content in the classics many of us have already read and love but might not have read and loved in quite this way. On the whole, the plan is to turn LGBT literature on its head.
JMW: In recent years, there was a lot of grumbling among Alyson Publishing authors about their experience with the company. How have you addressed this, if at all?
DW: Oh, yes, I’m well aware of the grumbling and often sympathize with what I’ve heard. There are ways you ought to conduct business, and there are ways you shouldn’t conduct business. Rather than get caught up in talking about where we were, however, I’d prefer to talk about where we are now that I’m here and where we plan to go. After all my years specializing in gay books, writers and hopefully readers know who I am and what I represent. It’s no coincidence that I publish many of the same people again and again or that people like Alison Bechdel and Christopher Rice send me authors or that writers and agents who would never have set foot in Alyson’s door are now working with us. Suffice to say we’ve turned a corner!
JMW: What do you see as the primary changes at Alyson Books since you've joined the company?
DW: Foremost is that the quality and breadth of our catalog has improved dramatically overnight. There’s an actual program suddenly in place, including new lines of titles, books in particular subject areas that have demand or say something important about where we live now. In many ways we publish a lot less to the mythic “gay person” who supposedly reads everything. While some titles may fit this broad category and appeal to anyone who’s gay, most don’t. Our interests as a community, I think, are too varied for such a wide approach. Instead I’m looking at audiences within the larger community, so that a book is no longer about, say, lesbians and breast cancer but instead white collar, middle-aged lesbians and their partners who are facing breast cancer. You can’t always focus your titles so precisely but it helps to know who exactly you expect to come to the book, why they should bother, and how to reach them. I also think important subgroups within the community get overlooked when we talk about ourselves as a big, one-size-fits-all community.
Another change worth mentioning is that Alyson is involved in the community as never before, partnering, for example, with the lesbian-run Astrea Foundation around fostering lesbian literature and with the Ali Forney Center, a transitional housing program for homeless LGBT youth in New York, whose clients I’m teaching the basics of publishing to. I should add that while these community links may be new to Alyson, I’ve always made the connection between work and the community. For years when I was just starting off I organized and operated a free book program in the mostly African American housing projects of Oakland, California, where there were no bookstores and few libraries. We gave away an estimated 10,000 new books, all donations from publishers I knew. My work there remains some of my happiest accomplishments, and I carry that same spirit of community partnership into the new Alyson where it belongs.
JMW: In a changing marketing and distribution landscape, how does Alyson Books plan to reach potential readers and promote its books? What should authors be expected to do themselves in this regard?
DW: Thanks to our parent company, Regent Media, Alyson is now incredibly well placed to promote our books. We have access to monthly exposure in magazines like The Advocate and Out, not to mention their highly trafficked websites. A banner ad for one of our titles on the sites, for example, can be seen by more than 3 million people. We also have access to Here TV, the gay cable channel. Plus there’s Gay.com, PlanetOut and Shewired, which Regent also owns. All told this is a revolutionary step for gay literature. None of our presses has ever had access to these numbers. Yet that’s only the beginning. There’s still the rest of the gay media as well as the alternative press and even the mainstream media, which ought to be covering more of our titles in the coming seasons.
As for author contribution, most writers should plan to carry a sizable share of the weight of promotion regardless where they publish. Publishers across the board have slashed their marketing and publicity budgets and most don’t have the staff to hold the hand of their authors. A lot of authors are very clear about these challenges and the smart ones when possible don’t wait for their editor to solve their problems – though sometimes the editor “is” the problem!
JMW: What are some of the more common mistakes authors make when contacting or submitting to Alyson Books? Are submission guidelines available?
DW: The most common off the top of my head: submitting work simply because it’s gay themed rather than something that actually fits out list, i.e. we don’t publish novellas or photo books; sending work in progress (yes, they tell you that in the cover letter); contacting me with questions about submitting before submitting, as if I have the time to guide each submission; sending random short stories when no call for submissions has been made; finally, misspelling my name or addressing me as “Mr. Alyson” when my name and introduction are the first thing you see on our website. Before submitting, writers should go to our website and use the “submissions” link for directions.
JMW: Any final words of advice or encouragement to LGBT writers out there?
DW: I was once in a creative writing class Samuel R. Delany taught where he told the students very truthfully that most of them would not be published. I think he meant publish a full-length work but even so, a fair number of aspiring writers simply won’t see their work in print regardless of size. I’m not a writer and I can’t imagine how it must feel to invest so much time and care with a project only to see it wind up going nowhere. I try to keep this frame of mind when people submit their work to me and to the extent that it’s possible, I try to respond to them in a manner I hope other editors respond to my writer friends when they submit their work elsewhere.
Needless to say, it’s an especially unpredictable moment in publishing, not just for writers but for editors and everyone else. Some people look at the difficult times and see hopelessness while others view the troubling times as at least opportunities for reinvention and renewal. Certainly, I’m reinventing Alyson, which is no small feat. Even in the best of times this would be a relatively tall order, so the fact that I’m attempting this here and now adds, well, a note of “drama” to the situation. The plus side of this is that in stepping outside of the business-as-usual model, I’m able to take some chances that, I think, will open new doors to writers and readers. But authors themselves can take action on their own, organizing panels, talks, festivals, contests, writer’s groups, blogs, promoting each other’s writing, supporting their local booksellers—there can’t be enough of this. As I’ve said before, gay literature is only as exciting as we as a community of book people choose to make it. We can complain endlessly about how tough our circumstances are or we can take charge and begin to create the world we want to live in. I really do believe that the power to move LGBT literature forward into a vibrant new future lies within all of us. It’s always a question of how many of us are willing to do the work necessary to get there.
That’s all the Book Buzz for now. So, go read a book!
John Morgan Wilson’s Benjamin Justice series has won an Edgar Allan Poe Award from Mystery Writers of America for best first novel and three Lambda Literary Awards for best gay men’s mystery. Bold Strokes Books has reissued John’s early Justice novels, including his 1996 Edgar winner, Simple Justice. Spider Season (St. Martin’s Minotaur), the eighth and latest in the series, was a 2009 Lammy finalist in the gay men’s mystery category. You can read the first chapter at www.johnmorganwilson.com.
July 2009
Hannah Free, starring Sharon Gless and based on Claudia Allen’s acclaimed stage play about the unabashed love of two women over several decades, will premiere at Outfest Los Angeles on July 10. As the film schedules future festival dates, Bella Books (www.BellaBooks.com) has acquired the print and digital rights to the novelization of the play, which Claudia will also write… Big news from the world of horror fiction: Vince Liaguno and Chad Helder have won the prestigious Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement from the Horror Writer’s Association for their anthology, Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet (www.DarkScribePress.com). To learn why this is so important, read our Q&A with Vince and Chad below… Icarus, the new quarterly of gay speculative fiction (fantasy, horror, SF) from Steve Berman’s Lethe Press, is officially out. Here’s the best link: http://lethepress.magcloud.com... Meanwhile, Lethe Press recently grabbed electronic and print rights to Ann Somerville's speculative novel Somatestesia… Attitude Books, the new imprint from Spinsters Ink (www.spinsters-ink.com), has published its first title, Rhiannon Argo’s debut novel, The Creamsickle. Attitude’s mission is to publish a new generation of edgy, young queer writers… Don Weise, editorial director of Alyson Books, has acquired Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla's second novel, The Two Krishnas, for a February 2010 release. The dramatic saga, set in 1970's Kenya and contemporary Los Angeles, centers on Pooja Kapoor, an East Indian banker’s wife who discovers that her husband has fallen in love with a Muslim boy about their son's age. Dhalla's (www.GhalibDhalla.com) first novel, Ode to Lata, was adapted as The Ode, an indie feature film released last year… Garrison Keillor has read several poems by Lammy-winning poet Ellen Bass on National Public Radio and she’s got the podcasts on her website (www.ellenbass.com)... Lesléa Newman has been awarded the Burning Bush Poetry Prize for her poem, "What the Angel Really Said" from her book, Nobody’s Mother (Orchard House Books). The poem will be published by Burning Bush Publications (www.bbbooks.com) in the online journal, In Our Own Words, this fall… Longtime Advocate cultural editor Mark Thompson has signed with Rebel Satori Press (www.rebelsatori.com) for a collection of biographical essays entitled Advocate Days & Other Stories, charting his journey as both witness and participant in the gay liberation movement. Look for it this Fall… Also later this year, Rebel Satori’s Queer Mojo imprint (www.queermojo.net) will release the first volume from SM Johnson’s DeVante trilogy of vampire novels, with books two and three to follow. Johnson’s DeVante's Coven was the grand prize winner in Project: QueerLit 2008… The Latecomer Legacy Project (www.latecomerlegacyproject.com) at A&M Books is officially underway, soliciting women's stories of their first experience with lesbian literature from the 1970s to today. (The project takes its name from The Latecomer by Sarah Aldridge, the first title from the legendary Naiad Press.) If you’d like to contribute your personal story, check the project website for details… Jere' Fishback's YA LGBT novel, Josef Jaeger, published by Prizm Books (www.prizmbooks.com), received a "Top Choice Award" from Flamingnet Reviews (www.flamingnet.com), where teens review books written for teens of all sexual orientations… Double Whammy: Bonnie J. Morris has not one but two books out this summer: Revenge of the Women's Studies Professor (Indiana University Press), based on her one-woman play of the same name exploring academic homophobia, and Big and Strong, I Belong! (Diversion Press), an anti-bullying tale… Jeffrey Beam has been honored as Poet of the Week on a new blog operated by North Carolina Poet Laureate Kay Byer (http://ncpoetlaureate.blogspot.com/), which also runs news about poets and poetry… Patricia Nell Warren’s Wildcat Press has sold the audio rights to The Front Runner to Audible, Inc., while Blackstone has released the audio version of her 1991 historical novel, One is the Sun… Finally: A couple of years back I had the honor of mentoring a young gay writer in PEN Center USA’s Emerging Voices fellowship program. Based in Los Angeles, it nurtures and supports talented aspiring creative writers who, for various reasons, lack access to mainstream publishing and writing opportunities. Now in its fourteenth year, the eight-month program provides, in addition to one-on-one mentoring, free classes at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, intimate Q&A evenings with professional writers, master classes by genre, workshops, and a $1,000 stipend. This year’s applications are due August 14. For more information, go to http://penusa.org/go/voices/section/emerging-voices/ or contact Libby Flores at libby@penusa.org... I’d also like to call your attention to the Lambda Literary Foundation’s new Directory of Professional Services. Among the writers offering their editorial support for a fee are Nancy K. Bereano, Stephen Evans, Lesléa Newman, Patricia Nell Warren, Terry Wolverton, and yours truly. Look for more names in various areas of writing, publishing, and publicity as the directory continues to grow.
And now, the Book Buzz Interview, with Vince Liaguno and Chad Helder:
Vince Liaguno (www.VinceLiaguno.com) is a writer, award-winning editor, and publisher of dark genre fiction who lives on the eastern end of Long Island, New York, with his partner of 21 years and their two Cocker Spaniels. His 2006 debut novel, The Literary Six, a tribute to the slasher films of the 80’s, won an Independent Publisher Award (IPPY). Vince is a member of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) and the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC). He is concurrently at work on his second and third novels.
Chad Helder (www.ChadHelder.com) lives in Portland, Oregon where he writes disturbing poetry and teaches a variety of writing classes. Helder's first book of poetry, Pop-Up Book of Death, will be published by Queer Mojo Press. He is the creator and writer of Bartholomew of the Scissors, the innovative horror comic book that features the creepy "comic-books-in-wood" illustrations of artist Daniel Crosier. In addition, Helder wrote a series of horror comic books for Vincent Price Presents. His flash fiction has appeared in The Harrow, and his poetry is forthcoming in Doorways Magazine. He’s currently at work on his second volume of queer poetry.
JMW: Tell us about your anthology, Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet, which recently won a Bram Stoker Award (http://www.stokers2009.com/).
 CH: Unspeakable Horror was released in December from Dark Scribe Press (www.DarkScribePress.com). The whole project began back in 2006 when I started a website called Unspeakable Horror. On the blog, I wrote about queer themes and GLBT portrayals in horror fiction and cinema, as well as featuring the work of new writers who wrote for the emerging gay horror subgenre. One of the main goals of the website was to define “queer horror” as a distinct subgenre that uses horror plots and motifs to explore societal themes related to GLBT life. Right away, Vince found the website and wrote to me when he was promoting his novel, The Literary Six. We started a correspondence, and pretty soon he had a blog on the website too. We realized that the best way to make a statement about the queer horror subgenre would be to put together our own collection of short fiction that portrays the range and diversity of the genre.
VL: The collection came together through a combination of open call submissions and invited authors. We assembled an eclectic lineup of talent from both the GLBT and horror literary communities that includes Lee Thomas, Jameson Currier, Rick R. Reed, Sarah Langan, and Kealan Patrick Burke and ended up with a collection of 23 stories. We’re really proud of the talent in this collection, including the five writers who made their professional debuts in the tome.
JMW: Tell us a little about the Bram Stoker Award.
VL: The Horror Writer’s Association (HWA) presents the Bram Stoker Awards for Superior Achievement, named in honor of Bram Stoker, author of the seminal horror work, Dracula, annually. The Stoker Awards were instituted immediately after the organization's incorporation in 1987. We won the award for Superior Achievement in an Anthology during the organization’s Stoker Weekend last month in Burbank, California. Of course, it was more than a little surreal to take the podium during an awards banquet in which Stephen King won two Stokers himself!
CH: Basically, the Stoker Award is the ultimate award for a horror writer, not only because it’s named after the great Bram Stoker, but because the nominees are selected and voted on by writers, editors, and publishers in the horror field. As long as I can remember, when I found a book or story designated as a Stoker Award-Winner, that story (or writer) carried with it a special distinction and prestige in my eyes, which is something that many non-horror fans might not be able to appreciate. There’s also something special about it because the award is unique to the horror genre, and I would guess that many horror writers feel the same. So, of course it is an amazing dream-come-true to have one on my mantelpiece.
JMW: I’ve heard that your win was groundbreaking for LGBT horror writers. Is that true?
VL: Definitely. Unspeakable Horror is the first GLBT-themed horror anthology to win a Stoker Award in its 22-year history. There was a moment after the awards when the reality of what we’d just done really set in. It was the perfect moment of surrealism and gratification. Our little anthology has secured a place in history, and we’re damn proud of that.
CH: Perhaps, in the past, our anthology would have been relegated to a “queer” award exclusively. However, I think Michael Rowe and the Queer Fear anthologies really paved the way for the existence of our anthology. In addition, Greg Herren’s anthology Shadows of the Night was a real inspiration to me. Queer themes have existed in the horror genre since the beginning. Sexuality and the repression of sexuality is a central theme in the horror genre, so anxiety about queerness has always been present in the genre. However, bringing the theme to the surface and portraying queer characters as heroes (instead of exclusively victims and “monster queers”) is what might be called groundbreaking about anthologies like the Queer Fear collections and our anthology.
 JMW: I’ve also heard there's a strong strain of homophobia in the horror reading and writing community. What has your experience been?
VL: I’ve been a member of the HWA for several years now and have never encountered homophobia or any kind of anti-gay postings on their message boards. In actuality, I’ve found the horror community and the HWA to embrace the diversity that GLBT-themed works bring to the genre. Chad and I were asked by the organizers of the HWA’s recent Stoker Weekend in Burbank to participate on a panel on GLBT horror, and the response from the audience was just fantastic.
CH: All of my interactions with horror writers have been awesome. I’ve encountered a lot of interest from writers of all walks regarding queer horror. Horror writers are really cool people!
JMW: Clive Barker is probably the most widely known openly gay horror writer, but who are some others that readers new to the genre might want to check out?
VL: In terms of anthologies, the Queer Fear collections that Michael Rowe edited are a terrific place to start. Michael’s also got a heartbreaking novella called “In October” in Triptych of Terror. Lee Thomas’ The Dust of Wonderland (a Lambda Literary Award winner) is a fantastic read, and Dark Scribe Press will be publishing his short story collection In the Closet, Under the Bed in late fall of this year. Jameson Currier is also a brilliant writer, and I’d strongly encourage anyone who enjoys literary ghost stories to check out The Haunted Heart and Other Tales, his forthcoming collection from Lethe Press.
CH: I am a huge fan of Vintage by Steve Berman [publisher of Lethe Press]. Also, Rick Reed has an impressive collection of gay horror novels. Like Vince, I love The Dust of Wonderland. If you can find a copy of Greg Herren’s Shadows of the Night, William J. Mann has a vampire story in there that is one of my all-time favorites.
JMW: Steve Berman has selected several stories from Unspeakable Horrors for Lethe's Best Gay Stories 2009 and Wilde Stories 2009. Any other similar news to share?
VL: With the Stoker win under our belts and glowing reviews from Fangoria and other review outlets, we’ll be pitching the collection to Michael Connor at InsightOut, hoping that the book club will carry the title to a GLBT-specific audience. We also submitted the anthology and several of the stories to the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards.
JMW: What's next for you two as writers?
CH: Right now I’m writing a book of poetry that explores connections between queerness, homophobia, and the horror genre that will be published by Dark Scribe Press. My first book of poetry, The Pop-Up Book of Death, is going to be published by Queer Mojo Press next year. My comic book, Bartholomew of the Scissors, will be published as a graphic novel in the fall.
VL: I’m finishing up my second novel The Renewed and have started work on my third, Final Girl. Both feature prominent gay characters and are firmly rooted in horror. I’m also in the process of editing another anthology, a collection of essays on slasher films called Butcher Knives & Body Counts, some of which will also speak to the queer elements of the oft-maligned, but surprisingly enduring, slasher sub-genre. Of course, with our Stoker win, we’re looking at each other now as if another volume of Unspeakable Horror is inevitable.
That’s all the Book Buzz for now. So, go read a book!
John Morgan Wilson’s Benjamin Justice series has won an Edgar Allan Poe Award from Mystery Writers of America for best first novel and three Lambda Literary Awards for best gay men’s mystery. Bold Strokes Books has reissued John’s early Justice novels, including his 1996 Edgar winner, Simple Justice. Spider Season (St. Martin’s Minotaur), the eighth and latest in the series, was a 2009 Lammy finalist in the gay men’s mystery category. You can read the first chapter at www.johnmorganwilson.com.
June 2009
Congratulations to the many LGBT writers and editors being honored by various organizations in recent weeks. Too many names to print here, but links to some of the lists of winners follow: the Lambda Literary Awards (www.lambdaliterary.org), Triangle Awards (www.publishingtriangle.org), Lesbian Fiction Readers Choice Awards (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LesbianFictionReadersChoiceAwards/), Saints & Sinners Literary Festival (www.sasfest.org), Popular Culture Association (http://pcaaca.org/awards/filmlit.php#), Independent Publisher Book Awards (http://www.independentpublisher.com/article.php?page=1298); and the ForeWord Book of the Year Awards (http://www.forewordmagazine.com/botya/index.aspx)… Nice timing: Just as West Hollywood gears up for the 39th annual Los Angeles Gay Pride Day on June 14, the University of Illinois Press is publishing C. Todd White’s Pre-Gay L.A., which explores the history of the modern American gay movement, which originated in L.A. in the late 1940s. It should make a nice companion piece to Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (Basic Books, 2006), written by Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons, now out in trade paperback… Five-time Lammy winner Ellen Hart has just inked with St. Martin’s Minotaur for two more mysteries in her Jane Lawless series following Sweet Poison, the latest, and The Mirror and the Mask, due out in November. Also coming in the fall, from Bella Books, are reissues of two early Jane Lawless titles… Marking his twenty years with HIV, noted stage artist Michael Kearns has his sixth book coming out in October from Heinemann. The Drama of AIDS: My Lasting Connections with Two Plays That Survived the Plague chronicles Michael's deeply personal relationship with Robert Chesley's Jerker and James Carroll Pickett's Dream Man as an actor, director, writer, and producer, spanning more than two decades… With two dozen books and more than forty awards to her credit, Lynda Sandoval has placed her latest young adult novel, Father Knows Best, with Bold Strokes Books’ new YA imprint, BSB Soliloquy, for publication next year… Another Bold Strokes author, Anne Laughlin, has been awarded a winter/spring residency at the nonprofit Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois, established in 1976 to provide uninterrupted creative time for selected artists. Anne’s mystery, Veritas, is due out later this year from BSB… Lesléa Newman , the official poet laureate of Northampton, MA, has finished another novel, The Reluctant Daughter, which BSB will publish in September… Lethe Press (www.lethepressbooks.com) has announced the publication of Icarus, a new quarterly specializing in gay speculative fiction (fantasy, horror, science fiction). The first issue features essays and articles by Jeff Mann and Wayne Wilkening and short fiction by Tom Cardamone, Jameson Currier, and Joel Lane... Amy Dawson Robertson has sold her first novel, Miles to Go, to Bella Books, in a two-book deal. Due out later this year, Miles to Go is a military thriller featuring a lesbian soldier serving in the Special Forces… After three gay-themed novels set in West Hollywood, Ben Patrick Johnson goes “mainstream” with the just-published If the Rains Don’t Cleanse (Havenhurst Books), a fictionalized account of his mother’s dangerous missionary work in the Belgian Congo in the 1950s… Author and performance artist Tim Miller garnered a rave from the Los Angeles Times for his latest performance piece, “Lay of the Land,” which LAT called “his most important work to date”… The Covey Cover Awards (http://thenewcoveycoverawards.blogspot.com) has honored Paul Harris with its “Most Eye-Catching” book cover award for April for his memoir, Diary from the Dome, Reflections on Fear and Privilege During Katrina, recounting his experience trapped in the Superdome while in New Orleans for Southern Decadence… Jack Fritscher’s cover photo from his fiction anthology, Corporal in Charge, is on display through July 31 at the Kinsey Institute’s Juried Art Show 2009 at the Indiana University School of Fine Arts Gallery… You can read novelist Noël Alumit’s impassioned piece on gay marriage on the Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/noel-alumit/the-solace-that-gay-marri_b_208335.html... Finally: Special thanks to Jack Fritscher, Len Barot (AKA Radclyffe), Trebor Healey, Karin Kallmaker, and Charles Flowers (please forgive me if I’ve missed anyone) for helping keep me abreast of so many organizations and awards. If I’ve neglected any – or if you’ve got other news that fits the Book Buzz guidelines – please let me know.
And now, the Book Buzz Interview, with Michele Karlsberg:
 2009 marks Michele Karlsberg’s twentieth year as a publicist for the LGBT publishing community, working with authors, organizations and film/theater professionals. As the curator of the nationwide “Outspoken: Gay and Lesbian Literary Series,” she continues to help new and established voices reach a broader audience. For Olivia Travel, Michele produced the first Olivia Book Expo on the Holland Americas Vandamn. She is also the co-editor with Karen X. Tulchinsky of two collections of lesbian fiction, To Be Continued and To Be Continued: Take Two, both from Firebrand Books.
JMW: How did you get into book publicity and come to specialize in LGBT authors?
MK: In 1989, I worked for Mavety Media Company and was the production coordinator for 120 adult sophisticate magazines. At that time, author Stan Leventhal was the editor for some of the gay male magazines and he had a lifelong dream of publishing gay men’s literature. Together with George Mavety and Joe Mauro we started Amethyst Press. We successfully published Dennis Cooper, Kevin Killian, Patrick Moore, John Gilgun, and Mark Ameen, among others. I came into this venture with absolutely no book publishing experience. Just a high school diploma. With the help of my mentors Nancy Bereano, Sasha Alyson, Barbara Grier, Richard Labonte, Carol Seajay and many other established colleagues I gained a wealth of knowledge in the book publishing industry. To this day I continue to acknowledge all of their work and I am very grateful for their guidance.
JMW: To give us an idea of the range of your clientele, who are some of your past and current authors and some forthcoming titles?
MK: A very select list would include Dorothy Allison, Anthony Bidulka, Kate Clinton, Shawn Stewart Ruff, Katherine V. Forrest, Brian McNaught, Jewelle Gomez and Jess Wells. Currently, I’m handling campaigns for I Told You So by Kate Clinton; Are You Guys Brothers? by Brian McNaught; Verge by Z Egloff; Finlater by Shawn Stewart Ruff; The Decade of Blind Dates by Richard Alther; and Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage by Nancy Polikoff.
JMW: What can a personal publicist accomplish that an author or publisher can’t?
MK: First, I believe an author/publisher can accomplish the same as a publicist. I also truly believe that no one can sell their book better then the author. However, writers and publishers have a hard time focusing on publicity because of the many different responsibilities they already have. It’s all about teamwork and the publicist is the captain. I work very hard to build strong relationships with the media, to establish strong media lists and keeping my marketing/publicity think tank going. I am constantly researching new leads, educating myself and keeping my finger on the pulse of marketing/publicity. I like to think “outside the box” and suggest ideas that seem feasible. I personally approach publicity/marketing as a 24/7 job.
JMW: What kind of expectations should an author have when he or she hires a publicist, and what expectations are unrealistic?
MK: Let’s start off with the unrealistic: Although Oprah might not be unrealistic, it is the first thing most authors ask for. “Can you get me on Oprah?” My reply is always: Let us first visit the areas of publicity that will help you saturate the media and markets that are right there and available to you now. Markets that you so easily forget because national mainstream media attention is your first thought. So many times people are sitting on the “jackpot” of outreach and visibility and never take advantage of it.
Realistic expectations include understanding that a publicist can't make someone write a story/review or put you on TV/radio. What a publicist can do is position you and the book in the most interesting way, and provide everything that the reporter/interviewer needs. I have spent twenty years building very strong media relationships and they trust in what I put on their desk as possible assignments. I study the industry thoroughly enough to have realistic expectations of what is possible. I always said and continue to say: It’s all about grassroots publicity.
JMW: What can authors do on their own, even with a publicist supporting them?
MK: Make sure you have a website. I actually suggest multiple websites. One under an author’s name and one under the book title. Blogging, vlogging, podcasts, tweets, facebook, myspace, dreamwalker.com, redroom.com, authorsden.com, goodreads.com, glbtq.com, shelfari.com, blogtalkradio.com. Create an amazon.com profile. Go to bookweb.org or booksense.com and start a list for your bookstore drive-bys. Take time to write personal, handwritten notes to independent booksellers across the country and to visit your local independent booksellers. Drop off a reader’s copy to booksellers, sign copies they have in house, and supply them a shelf marker. Meet with the staff and create a personal connection with them to encourage the hand-selling of your book. Write book reviews. Join online book clubs, writers groups and community forums. I could go on forever. The point is, an author should have continuous involvement in the literary world. With social media all the templates for success are out there to help bring forth their works. Never stop networking and attending conferences. I know we live now more and more in this virtual world but don’t forget to step away from that e-vehicle.
JMW: How can an author be sure a publicist is professional and hard-working, and not just out to get their money?
MK:: Open up conversations with other writers about their experiences with the publicists they have worked with. Take a look at writers’ acknowledgement pages in their books to see which publicists they are thanking. I always fear the publicist who promises the world and says no one can do what I do. When I first speak with a writer, I am completely honest about what I won’t be able to do for them and they appreciate that honesty ten-fold.
JMW: What can an author expect to pay for your services?
MK:: My services work on a sliding scale fee depending on what each publicity campaign entails. I would never charge hourly, I would feel as if I was ripping someone off. I was just recently asked how many hours a week I dedicate to each author I work with. That answer would be an infinite amount of time. I go as far as using my personal vacations as an outreach tool to those reading books, whether it be on a cruise ship or on the beach. If I can work it into a conversation while I am out and about I am never shy to plug an author’s book. My contracts break up my fee into two or three monthly payments but authors who have worked with me know that we don’t stop on that 90th day. I also spend many hours consulting with writers pro bono. I take their personal projects as if they are my own. I feel very lucky and honored to work with writers and performers. After twenty years, most of my business comes through word of mouth.
JMW: How have media and book publicity changed in recent years and what changes do you see ahead, in general and for LGBT authors in particular?
MK: Well, I call the olden days the golden days. We had the Gay Lesbian Feminist aisle at American Booksellers Association (ABA), which is now Book Expo America (BEA). We also had the Feminist Bookstore Network and the GLBT bookstore network that had over 150 specialty stores combined. We held retreats. OUTWRITE, the GLBT writers conference, attracted hundreds. We had a literary community that just wouldn’t stop. We were family. With time, things have changed. Economics, commercial giants, fierce competition, bookstores and publications closing down, publishers forced into bankruptcy. The literary landscape has changed dramatically.
Don’t get me wrong – there is a new literary community out there where some of the old still stand strong. If we keep our strength and love of books as we move forward together we can keep our literary history alive and well. I constantly flash back to the eighties and nineties when I watched a huge part of our literary community die. This gives me the motivation to keep on publicizing the voices that need to be heard. No one knows for sure what the future holds for the book industry, but I do know there is nothing like holding an actual book in your hand to read, instead of an electronic device. Hopefully, with the right support from readers, we can keep hard copies of books in print.
The bottom line is I love what I do. If I could share my knowledge with others to move onward and upward, then I am one happy gal.
JMW: I want to make it clear that we are not endorsing you or personal publicists in general. But if someone wishes to contact you, how would they do that?
MK: I'm listed in Lambda Literary's Directory of Professional Services. My office is at 101 Lexington Ave, Staten Island, New York 10302. My office phone number is 718/351-9599. Or they can e-mail me at karlsbergm@aol.com.
That’s all the Book Buzz for now. So, go read a book!
John Morgan Wilson’s Benjamin Justice series has won an Edgar Allan Poe Award from Mystery Writers of America for best first novel and three Lambda Literary Awards for best gay men’s mystery. Bold Strokes Books has reissued John’s early Justice novels, including his 1996 Edgar winner, Simple Justice. Spider Season (St. Martin’s Minotaur), the eighth and latest in the series, was a 2009 Lammy finalist in the gay men’s mystery category. You can read the first chapter at www.johnmorganwilson.com.
May 2009
By now, the dust has settled on last month’s Amazon.com brouhaha, in which the online bookseller stripped thousands of LGBT titles of their sales rankings (a key promo perk linked to web searches and bestseller lists), supposedly because of their “adult” content. Everything from queer classics to squeaky clean children’s books were expunged, triggering a worldwide response that led Amazon to restore most of the banned titles. Whether it was censorship or a technical glitch – as Amazon later claimed – countless LGBT writers propelled the protest. It was apparently triggered when author-blogger Mark Probst (http://markprobst.livejournal.com) e-mailed Erastes, director of the Erotic Authors Association, tipping her that her titles had disappeared from the Amazon rankings. Her blog (http://community.livejournal.com/erotic_authors/103451.html) fueled an e-blast from writers like Anne Brooke (http://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com). The word spread and the mainstream media picked it up, with PC World blogger JR Raphael claiming to have sorted it all out (http://www.pcworld.com/article/163126/)... Speaking of Erastes, she sends word that Romance Writers of America has a new LGBT online chapter, Rainbow Romance Writers (www.rainbowromancewriters.com). Among those instrumental in making it happen: Jade Buchanan, Kimberly Gardner, Sara Bell, JL Langley, and Laura Baumbach… Rebel Satori’s Queer Mojo imprint (www.queermojo.net) has expanded to include poetry, with the acquisition of collections by j/j hastain, Chad Helder and Shane Allison… Jack Fritscher picked up two awards from the National Leather Association: for Best Non-fiction Article, “The Legendary Larry Townsend,” and Best Non-Fiction Book, Gay San Francisco. To view all the winners, use the link on NLA’s home page (http://www.nla-i.com/html/index.php)... Jack’s Stonewall: Stories of Gay Liberation, is also a ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards finalist (www.forewordmagazine.com)... Triple Threat: P.D. Publishing, Inc. has acquired print rights for author Ann Somerville's speculative fiction/BDSM novel, Remastering Jerna, aimed at summer publication, as well as the sequel, Consequences, and a third novel, Hidden Faults… Malcolm Boyd turns 86 on June 8 and his voice remains strong. His 32nd book, Wisdom for the Aging: Practical Advice for Living the Best Years of Your Life Right Now, is due out from Ken Arnold Books next month… Rich Murphy has won the Tenth Annual Gival Press Poetry Award for his collection, Voyeur… Trebor Healey is proof that when a press folds, it doesn’t mean the publisher’s titles have to die with it. From the ashes of Haworth Press, acquired last year by Taylor & Francis, Trebor rescued his fiction collection, A Perfect Scar and Other Stories, due out this month from Rebel Satori. Trebor also had a short story in a Haworth collection, Fool For Love, edited by R.D. Cochrane and Timothy Lambert, which they placed with Cleis Press. And Trebor’s nonfiction anthology, Queer and Catholic, edited with Amie M. Evans for Haworth, was picked up and published last year by Routledge, a Taylor & Francis subsidiary... Two poems from James Cihlar’s collection, Undoing , from Little Pear Press (www.littlepearpress.com), are winners of Prairie Schooner’s Glenna Luschei Award... A review in Sojourners Magazine, a progressive Christian journal, had high praise for Eric Gutierrez’s Disciples of the Street: The Promise of a Hip Hop Church, which has a strong gay element… Reminder: The Lambda Literary Awards will be announced May 28 in NYC at the Foundation’s annual fund-raising dinner. For details, visit http://www.lambdaliterary.org/awards/annual_llf_awards.html... And don’t forget the 21st Annual Triangle Awards on May 7, honoring gay and lesbian fiction, nonfiction and poetry (www.publishingtriangle.org/)... Ditto Saints & Sinners, the festive LGBT literary gathering May 14-17 in New Orleans (www.sasfest.org)... Last but not least, the Benjamin Franklin Awards (several LGBT authors are among the finalists), sponsored by the Independent Book Publishers Association. Winners will be announced at the IBPA awards ceremony in NYC on May 28. For details, and a list of all the finalists, go to http://www.ibpa-online.org/pubresources/benfrank.aspx... Finally: Last year, I contributed a personal essay on the late Vito Russo to Love, West Hollywood: Reflections of Los Angeles (Alyson), a current Lammy finalist edited by Chris Freeman and James J. Berg. Now, with other friends of Vito, I’ll be interviewed by filmmaker Jeffrey Schwarz for his documentary, The Life and Times of Vito Russo, about the beloved activist and author of The Celluloid Closet. If you knew Vito and have special memories to share you might contact Jeffrey at jeffrey@automatpictures.com.
And now, the Book Buzz Interview, with Len Barot:
Len Barot is the president of Bold Strokes Books, Inc., an independent LGBTQ publishing house with more than 50 authors and 160 active titles in print. A retired surgeon, Len lives in Upstate New York with her partner, Lee. Under her pseudonym, Radclyffe, Len has written 32 novels and edited and contributed to dozens of anthologies. Seven of her works have been Lambda Literary Award finalists, including the Lambda Literary winners Erotic Interludes 2: Stolen Moments, edited with Stacia Seaman, and the romance Distant Shores, Silent Thunder.
(Photo by Shane Salek)
JMW: When and why did you found Bold Strokes Books?
LB: Bold Strokes Books will mark five years in July. I believe that our literature is a fundamental part of the queer culture and a lifeline for many of us, and it has always been part of my life. Publishing offers me something that writing cannot – it allows me to be a part of the greater world of LGBTQ literature by promoting the work of other authors, and I am gratified every day to be able to contribute. I also learn a great deal about my own craft from working intimately with editors and authors. And finally, making books is just plain fun.
JMW: How many books does BSB expect to publish this year, and in what genres and subject areas?
LB: Our 2009 schedule includes 58 titles, spanning gay and lesbian general fiction, from Leslea Newman's The Reluctant Daughter to John Caruso's portrayal of Lucifer as the "genius of desire" in Lightbearer, to all categories of genre fiction: romance, gay and lesbian mystery, gay erotica, lesbian erotica, and speculative fiction.
JMW: Until fairly recently, Bold Strokes was known as a lesbian press. Now you have a number of male authors in the fold, including me, for my early reprints. Why the expansion to include men?
LB: I have always been a fan of gay literature (I have first editions of most of the gay works published in the 70s and later), and it was always my long-range plan to expand Bold Strokes into a queer publishing house. Naturally I started with the works and the audience I knew best, which was lesbian fiction. As Bold Strokes became established and the shift in gay and lesbian publishing moved away from "mainstream" houses back toward the independents, I felt it was the right time to begin signing men who were writing gay general and genre fiction. We now have titles from guys writing gay male general fiction, erotica, and mysteries and we are actively reviewing submissions from men every day.
JMW: Not to slight any of your other authors, but can you mention one particular title that might indicate a new avenue for Bold Strokes?
LB: In addition to our adult general and genre fiction lines, we have recently signed our first YA title, Lynda Sandoval's Father Knows Best, in our new BSB Soliloquy line. We look forward to publishing young adult works exploring identity, gender, relationship and life issues.
JMW: Besides YA, any other subjects or areas where you'd like to see more ideas and submissions in the year ahead?
LB: I'd love to see general and genre works exploring gender and transgender subjects; urban fantasy from both gay and lesbian authors; gay male mysteries, erotica and romance; young adult submissions; and any exciting, queer-affirming work in any area. We have two general fiction lines (Victory and Liberty), one YA line (Soliloquy), and a broad range of category fiction lines in print and eBook (BSB, Matinee, Aeros) to accommodate the tremendous diversity of our writing and reading community.
JMW: What are some common mistakes writers might avoid when contacting Bold Strokes?
LB: Our submission guidelines (www.boldstrokesbooks.com/publish.html) are extensive and specific. If authors hope to have their manuscripts read, they should carefully review and follow these guidelines. A solid, concise synopsis and a polished manuscript will catch the eye of the editors. A mistake inexperienced authors often make is rushing a work and submitting what is actually a first draft as opposed to a finished product. Typos and grammatical errors are huge red flags.
JMW: Where can readers and booksellers find and order books from Bold Strokes?
LB: We offer direct-to-customer sales of print and e-Books online at www.boldstrokesbooks.com. We also provide a list of many local independent booksellers and a complete list of our distributors at http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/sales.html.
That’s all the Book Buzz for now. So, go read a book!
John Morgan Wilson’s Benjamin Justice series has won the Edgar Allan Poe Award from Mystery Writers of America and three Lambda Literary Awards for best gay men’s mystery. Bold Strokes Books has reissued John’s early Justice novels, including his 1996 Edgar winner, Simple Justice. Spider Season (St. Martin’s Minotaur), the eighth in the series, is a current finalist for a Lammy in the gay men’s mystery category. You can read the first chapter at www.johnmorganwilson.com.
April, 2009
It’s awards season, so let’s get started: To see the complete list of 105 finalists for this year’s Lambda Literary Awards, representing 72 publishers in 22 LGBT categories, go to Lammy Finalists. For details on the May 28 awards ceremony in NYC, visit Lammy Awards Ceremony ... The 21st Annual Triangle Awards, honoring gay and lesbian fiction, nonfiction and poetry, will be handed out May 7 in NYC. Among this year’s recipients: Martin Duberman, who receives the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. To see a list of all finalists and details on this free event, go to www.publishingtriangle.org/... Nina Revoyr’s The Age of Dreaming (Akashic Books) is a nominee for a Los Angeles Times Festival of Books Award (http://www.latimes.com/extras/bookprizes/) in the mystery/thriller category. If you recall, Val McDermid won this prize in 2000 for A Place of Execution... ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Awards finalists (www.forewordmagazine.com) included Merry Shannon, Gabrielle Goldsby, and Radclyffe… Radclyffe also turned up as a finalist – twice – on the EPPIE (Electronic Publishing) Awards list (www.epicauthors.com) for In Deep Waters 2: Cruising the Strip (edited with Karin Kallmaker) in the Erotica Anthology category and Winds of Fortune, Rad’s erotic romance… Eloise Klein Healy and Elizabeth Bradfield are also celebrating doubly this awards season. Elizabeth’s Interpretive Work, the first release from Eloise’s Arktoi Books imprint, is a finalist for Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Lesbian Poetry Prize and a Lammy finalist in the same category (see our Q&A with Eloise below)… Nancy K. Pearson’s Two Minutes of Light (Perugia Press) won the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Prize in Poetry… The Saints & Sinners Literary Festival, devoted to LGBT writing, will take place May 14-17 in New Orleans’ French Quarter. In addition to classes, panels, theater, readings, dinners, a book fair and lots of socializing, S&S will present the James Duggins Mid-Career Author Award (and $5,000 each) to Michael Lowenthal and Elana Dykewomon… C. Dale Young is the recipient of a 2009 Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, valued at $25,000… Another Lammy nominee, Neil Plakcy's Mahu Fire, won the Hawaii Five-O Award for best police procedural at the Left Coast Crime mystery conference…Steve Berman is stepping down as editor of Lethe Press, while remaining as owner and publisher. Craig Gidney takes Steve’s place… At Graywolf Press, Polly Carden has been promoted to assistant editor… Patricia Nell Warren’s Wildcat Press has sold publishing rights in Italy to Harlan's Race, the sequel to her gay classic, The Front Runner, which is now in print in eleven languages… To mark the 40th anniversary of Stonewall, Mark Thompson and Richard Labonte have written introductory essays for Jack Fritscher’s Stonewall: Stories of Gay Liberation. For a preview, visit www.jackfritscher.com... Raymond Luczak has created a subtitled video clip, talking in American Sign Language about his book, Assembly Required: Notes from a Deaf Gay Life (RID Press). RID is the publishing branch of the Registry of the Interpreters of the Deaf. You can view the clip at YouTube ... Fallen Angel Reviews (http://rainbow-reviews.com/?p=1042) has given a “recommended read” to Stevie Woods’ historical novel Conflict, a sequel to her earlier Cane, continuing the story into the Civil War… Bill Warner’s GLB Publishers (www.glbpubs.com) has officially launched a companion site, www.e-transgenmag.com, which he believes is the only online publisher specializing in transgender writing… Bold Strokes Books has announced several acquisitions: Shea Godfrey’s romantic fantasy, Nightshade; Greg Herren’s mystery, Vieux Carré Voodoo; and Yolanda Wallace’s romance novel, In Media Res. All are scheduled for release in 2010… Another first novel from Bella Books: Waltzing at Midnight by Robbi McCoy (www.robbimccoy.com)... Bella is also busy with its June 4-7 Y Tour of the greater Denver area, putting “the Y back in womYn” and a number of its lesbian authors in touch with over 2,000 female readers. The Lambda Literary Foundation is a co-sponsor. For details, visit www.BellaYTour.com... I’m pleased to again serve on the planning committee of the West Hollywood Book Fair (www.westhollywoodbookfair.org/), which each year brings together more than 300 diverse writers and 20,000 visitors of all ages. This eighth annual WHBF is set for Sunday, October 4. To be considered for a panel or other author event, contact Corey Roskin at croskin@weho.org with a brief description of you and your published work.
And now, the Book Buzz Interview, with Eloise Klein Healy:
Eloise Klein Healy, Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing Emerita, was the founding chair of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles. She is the author of six books of poetry. Her most recent collection, The Islands Project: Poems For Sappho, is from Red Hen Press. Ms. Healy directed the Women’s Studies Program at California State University Northridge and taught in the Feminist Studio Workshop at The Woman’s Building in Los Angeles. She is the co-founder of ECO-ARTS, an eco-tourism/arts venture and founding editor of Arktoi Books.
JMW: When and why was Arktoi Books created as a new imprint of Red Hen Press and what is its focus?
EKH: In 2006, I arranged to create an imprint with Red Hen Press, a nationally respected small press publisher located in Los Angeles. I chose Red Hen because the editors, Kate Gale and Mark Cull, are publishers whose goal is to expand the range of authors who might not find their way to more mainstream presses. Also, I have had three books published with Red Hen and I have a good working relationship with them. I wanted to create an imprint – meaning I would basically be the acquisitions editor, and I would also shepherd books through the publication process and mentor the authors. In my experience as a lesbian author, and in my role as a judge of many literary competitions, I had noticed a drop in the opportunities for lesbian writers to publish high quality literary work. Thus, by making one more path for lesbian authors to take toward publication, I could affect the community of lesbian writers in a positive way. At Arktoi, I currently publish one book a year [note: Red Hen publishes 18-20 books a year] and have established a submission schedule that rotates from poetry through fiction through nonfiction. I also have a marketing director, Nickole Brown, who carries out a publicity and marketing plan based on our discussions with the author of each book.
JMW: Who are some of the authors Arktoi Books is publishing, and why?
EKH: Elizabeth Bradfield is the first Arktoi author. Liz is a nature guide, leading whale watching trips in both Alaska and Baja California. Her collection of poems, Interpretive Work, focuses on environmental issues and examines how people "see" things, how cultures shape what is "seen." I'm happy to say that Liz is a finalist for both the 2008 Audre Lorde Lesbian Poetry Prize sponsored by New York's Publishing Triangle and the 2008 Lambda Lesbian Poetry Prize. These nominations speak well of the wonderful talent Liz possesses. Ching-In Chen, the second Arktoi author, is finishing up an MFA degree at UC Riverside. She has worked in community organizing in both Boston and San Francisco and is very active in queer politics. The Heart's Traffic, her first collection, is a novel in poems that chronicles the life of Xiomei, a young girl who loses her best friend Sparrow on the eve of her immigration to the United States from China. The book follows Xiomei's childhood and young adulthood, her developing sexuality and lesbian identity, and the haunting memory of her dead friend. Ching-In's book has just come out and she is already receiving very positive reviews. Cathy Kirkwood is the first fiction writer that Arktoi Books will publish. Right now we are in the editing phase, just about to go into production for a 2010 release. Cathy's Cut Away, a novel that takes place in Los Angeles and the Salton Sea, features a lesbian plastic surgeon, a trangendered woman, a missing adolescent girl, and the girl's mother.
JMW: What are some of the more common reasons you reject submitted collections?
EKH: There is much excellent work that has been submitted to Arktoi Books. So it is very difficult to choose just one book to publish in a year. I can say that submissions are rejected because: 1) the collection of poems or the fiction manuscript is just not ready – not fully formed in the mind of the writer and, thus, is not working on the page; 2) the subject matter is not what I'm looking for (for example, I am not interested in publishing work that is solely focused on erotica – there are already many presses doing that work); and 3) the language is not crafted to the level of excellence that I'm looking for.
JMW: Where can interested readers find Arktoi Books and Red Hen Press Books?
EKH: Arktoi books and Red Hen books are distributed by the University of Chicago distribution system and can be ordered directly from U. of Chicago. But books can also be ordered directly from the Red Hen website at www.redhen.org. Of course, online bookstores carry the titles and your local independent bookstore will have them or order them. For people living in Los Angeles and environs, Skylight Books in Los Feliz (note: East Hollywood area) is a good place to check.
JMW: Where can interested writers find Red Hen Press submission guidelines?
EKH: The guidelines are posted at www.redhen.org/arktoi.asp; www.eloisekleinhealy.com/arktoi.html; and soon at www.arktoibooks.com. I also respond to inquiries at eloisekleinhealy@mac.com.
That’s all the Book Buzz for now. So, go read a book!
March, 2009
Congratulations to author and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who became an instant gay icon with his moving acceptance speech after winning the Oscar for best original screenplay for Milk. The award makes his two books from Newmarket Press -- Milk: The Shooting Script and Milk: A Pictorial History of Harvey Milk (with a foreword by Armistead Maupin) -- even more relevant...Later this spring, when A&M Books publishes the 35th anniversary edition of The Latecomer by Sarah Aldridge, the publisher will also launch the Latecomer Legacy Project, collecting stories from readers about the authors and books that helped them come out. The new edition includes the original novel, plus reflections from noted writers, musicians and activists about this first book from the legendary Naiad Press… Queer Mojo, the new imprint of Rebel Satori Press, hits the ground running with an updated edition of Christ Like, Emanuel Xavier's celebrated first novel, to mark its tenth anniversary. (Look for it this spring.) QM also has various works in the pipeline from Trebor Healey, Stephen Beachy, and Kevin Killian, and three grand-prize winners of Project:QueerLit 2008 - Rakelle Valencia, Sheri Johnson and L.A. Fields... Lucy Jane Bledsoe has taken first prize in the International Arts Movement juried fiction competition with her short story, “Enough,” which can be seen on her Red Room page (www.redroom.com/author/lucy-jane-bledsoe)... To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Felice Picano’s first gay novel, The Lure, Bold Strokes Books will reissue the thriller that got significant crossover attention when it was first published in 1979. Felice has written an introduction for this new edition, which appears next month… Jack Fritscher has made the entire text of his Gay San Francisco available for reading in a series of free pdfs at www.JackFritscher.com. The book’s subtitle says it all: Eyewitness Drummer – A Memoir of the Sex, Art, Salon, Pop Culture War and Gay History of Drummer Magazine from the Titanic 1970s to 1999… Coinciding with PRIDE month, Scribner has chosen April 14 to publish The Other Side of Paradise, a memoir by poet/artist/performer Staceyann Chin (www.Staceyannchin.com)... Andrew Sean Greer’s The Confessions of Max Tivoli (Picador) is getting new attention, with comparisons to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (see a recent Newsweek piece at http://www.newsweek.com/id/183713). Meanwhile, Greer’s The Story of a Marriage is due out in paperback next month… Pam Harrison is the recipient of Prism Comics' fourth annual Queer Press Grant for House of Muses: The Latter Days of Sappho of Lesbos, her series based on the writings of Sappho and Alkaios...The rights to Eduardo Santiago's Tomorrow They Will Kiss, an Edmund White Award nominee, have been optioned by Hemisphere Entertainment. The novel is set in the turbulent years following the Cuban revolution of 1959… Time Out New York has christened D. A. Powell “the best poet of his generation – and arguably the most important poet under fifty.” Powell’s latest collection, Chronic, is just out from Graywolf Press… Memoirs have been heavily scrutinized for accuracy lately, but Linda Morganstein (www.lindamorganstein.com) has sidestepped that issue. She’s calling My Life With Stella Kane, her story of a lesbian star in ‘50s, a “fictional memoir”… Julie Abraham’s Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities (University of Minnesota Press) has been described as “sweeping…from the destruction of Sodom…to the The L Word…” To see just how sweeping, you can peruse the table of contents at http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/A/abraham_metropolitan.html... Duke University Press (www.dukeupress.edu/books) ventures east into gay territory with two titles that sound enticing: Chocolate and Other Writings on Male Eroticism, by Pandey Bechan Sharma, and James Baldwin's Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile, by Magdalena J. Zaborowska… Kenny Fries has received a 2009 Creative Capital grant for Innovative Literature to develop his new book, Genkan: Entries into Japan, a non-fiction work that uses his experience as a physically disabled gay foreigner to look at the way Japan views and adapts to otherness… Reminder: The Third Annual Palm Springs Lesbian Book Festival, sponsored by Bold Strokes Books (www.boldstrokesbooks.com) and Casitas Laquita Resort, takes place March 5-8. It’s free and no pre-registration is required... Sadly, the West Hollywood branch of A Different Light Books has closed, leaving only the San Francisco store from the original four that opened in the 1970s (in N.Y., S.F, and L.A.). Last year, I used WeHo’s historic LGBT bookstore as a setting in my novel, Spider Season, noting that ADL was struggling to survive. Now, my scene has become an homage and sad farewell to one of our cultural landmarks.
And now, the Book Buzz Interview, with Kathleen Warnock:
Editor, playwright and fiction writer Kathleen Warnock is the new editor of the Lesbian Erotica Series at Cleis Press (www.cleispress.com). Her erotica has appeared in the "Best Lesbian Erotica" anthologies, as well as "Friction 7" and "A Woman's Touch." Her plays, which are widely published, have been seen in New York, London, Dublin (Ireland and Georgia), and regionally. A resident of New York City, she curates the monthly "Drunken! Careening! Writers!" series at KGB Bar the third Thursday of every month, as well as the Robert Chesley/Jane Chambers Playwrights Project for TOSOS Theater. Just to keep busy, she is also playwrights company manager for Emerging Artists Theatre and a member of the Publishing Triangle and the Dramatists Guild.
JMW: Before we get to the Lesbian Erotica Series, tell us about Cleis Press in general. What and how much is it publishing these days?
KW: Cleis Press is the largest independent queer publishing company in the United States. Felice Newman and Frédérique Delacoste founded Cleis Press in 1980, and have worked together as co-publishers ever since. If you take a look at the Cleis website, you’ll see that they offer many flavors of erotica, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. To quote Frederique: “We are a queer press, and I enjoy that point of view—living/thinking outside of the box. Our core audience was and possibly still is lesbians, but we have a large gay audience and a lot of queer or straight people read us and feel reflected in the work we do.” You can find reprints of classic lesbian pulp novels by Ann Bannon at Cleis; books about human rights; gender studies; graphic novels; biography and memoir.
JMW: Describe your new role at Cleis, and why you took it on.
KW: I’ve known Tristan Taormino, the founding editor of the series, for a long time. We both took classes at The Writer’s Voice at the West Side YMCA, and I ran into her at events like Fragglerock (the downtown queer rock night that was so much fun in the mid-90s). I followed her work as she founded the ‘zine “Pucker Up” (which is still the name of her website), and then launched Best Lesbian Erotica. I sent stuff of my own in, and had several stories chosen for the series. Last year, when Tristan decided to move on, she asked me if I’d be interested in taking over as series editor, and I was honored to say yes. (In my day job, I’m also an editor, though on a completely different topic.) So now I work with Cleis on choosing the guest editor, and screening the submissions to finalists, preparing the manuscript, and doing what I can to promote it.
JMW: Have the parameters of lesbian erotica changed over the years? If so, how?
KW: I went back and read some of the earlier editions, when lesbian erotica anthologies were first beginning to come on the market; early on there are segments from novels (with a brief synopsis), and there often seemed to be a more serious tone to the volumes, as though something couldn’t be funny and sexy or it had to prove its literary worth by being very serious. Over the years, I think writers have become more comfortable and versatile within the form, and are working in it enough to develop individual voices. There are many more writers working in erotica, and practicing online with blogs and writers’ groups, and websites which offer resources to erotica writers. I also think there are people coming out of the “slash” (fan fiction) world and developing into writers of original prose.
JMW: Why is it important or valuable to publish lesbian erotica?
KW: Well one important reason is that I think we are coming out of an extremely sex-negative and queer-negative time in our country. I think it’s become more acceptable in the last eight years for narrow-minded, bigoted people to openly declare their prejudices and homophobia and be proud of it; to claim to be morally superior because they fuck the “right” person. For that reason, it’s important to make sure that there’s excellent queer and sex-positive work available for people to read and enjoy, right out there in the bookstores and online booksellers. We’re not going anywhere, and we’re not going to hide.
JMW: Are there limits or standards about what Cleis Press will or will not publish?
KW: Well, they let me shape the call for submissions, which is based on Tristan’s (if it ain’t broke…) and my limits are: no sex with children; no sex with animals; no non-consensual sex. That leaves a lot of room for a plethora of scenarios, including sex between teenagers (the high school crush that turns physical is a time-honored, and often well-done story); I’ve read stories where people pretend to be animals; and there is certainly a huge spectrum of dominant/submissive and role-playing scenarios to be explored. In the past, there have been stories selected that involved threesomes, males, stories set in various time periods past, present and future, written in the first, second and third person, and between females of different species (sci-fi erotica).
JMW: As an editor, what advice would you give to writers about writing erotica? What are some of the common weaknesses or problems you encounter?
KW: A thought I’ve had while going through submissions is: just because you’ve had lesbian sex doesn’t mean you can write about it. (The cover letters often say: this really happened to me!) Be a writer first, then write well about erotic experiences. Write stories that make YOU hot. If it’s good enough to get you aroused, it will probably reach out to another reader. It can be a fragment of fucking, or a complete short story, but make the characters people we want to know more about (I didn’t say LIKE), and make them follow a real logic, make them live in the world you’ve created. Make us see what they want, and what they’ll give for it. And please follow the guidelines for submission (link below).
JMW: What should we look for from the Lesbian Erotica Series in the year ahead?
KW: Well, the submissions are coming in from all over the world. I’ve also beaten the bushes (HA!) to make sure that the call for submissions went to writers I know who might not have thought of writing erotica, but whose voices and style I like. So I hope we’ll see a lot of new names in the anthology, as well as some of my favorite ones. I think I’ll have a lot of good work to pass along to the guest judge (each series has a guest judge who makes the final decisions and writes an introduction to the volume).
JMW: If a writer wants to submit to you, how should she go about it?
KW: First of all, I also accept submissions from men. There are women who write excellent male POV erotica (and I have published gay male erotica), so I know there are men who can write lesbian erotica. However, that is not license to email me to talk dirty to a lesbian (and yes, this has happened). Specific submission guidelines can be found at http://www.puckerup.com/ble_guidelines and on various erotica sites around the ‘net. People can also email me questions (but not submissions) at kwarnockble@gmail.com.
That’s all the Book Buzz for now. So, go read a book!
February, 2009
To celebrate its twentieth year in publishing, White Crane Institute (www.gaywisdom.org/institute.html) has established the James White Poetry Prize for Gay Men's Poetry, which will carry a $1,000 cash award and a publishing contract with White Crane Books. Mark Doty, a Lambda and a National Book Award winner, will be the prize judge. Look for the official announcement in the spring issue of Music & Poetry magazine….Meanwhile, White Crane has an important new title in the works: the Radical Faerie Reader, edited by Don Kilhefner and Mark Thompson … Nancy Garden’s award-winning YA novel, Annie on My Mind, is out on audio from the Random House Listening Library. The love story between two teenage girls was the subject of a much-publicized banning attempt when it was first published in 1982. After twenty-seven years, it’s still in print … The 2009 Alice B. Readers' Appreciation Awards for lesbian fiction have just been announced: Gun Brooke, Jane Fletcher, Nicola Griffith, and Lesléa Newman. For details, visit www.alicebawards.org ... Ginn Hale has won the Spectrum Award for best novel, 2008, in the science fiction/fantasy/horror category for Wicked Gentlemen (Blind Eye Books), which was also a finalist for the Lammy last year… Subtropics 7 (http://www.english.ufl.edu/subtropics), the seventh issue of the literary journal edited by David Leavitt, is now out. Among the contributors: James Magruder, with a short story, "Tenochtitlan"… The third annual Palm Springs Bold Strokes Books Lesbian Book Festival will be held March 5-March 8. For more information, visit www.boldstrokesbooks.com/events.html. Meanwhile, Bold Strokes has announced several notable acquisitions: Veritas, a new mystery from Anne Laughlin, previously named an Emerging Writer by the Lambda Literary Foundation; Lightbearer, a novel from John Caruso, reflecting his own experience as a gay man coming out of both Christian fundamentalism and homosexual reparative therapy; and Elizabeth Ridley’s classic, The Remarkable Journey of Miss Tranby Quirke, set in 1909…Publisher Fay Jacobs of A&M Books will reissue a special 35th Anniversary edition of the first book ever published by the legendary Naiad Press, The Latecomer by Sarah Aldridge. It will include comments from Ann Bannon, Katherine V. Forrest, Radclyffe, Lee Lynch, Holly Near and many others. Look for it in April…Speaking of Radclyffe, her Honor series was featured in a Slate article on the emerging new stars of lesbian romance novels – Secret Service agents. You can read it at http://www.slate.com/id/2209142/... GLB Publishers, which neglected to include a "T" in its name when it started publishing print books twenty years ago, is partially atoning by adding transgender fiction and nonfiction at www.e-transgenmag.com, which will join its existing e-book ventures, www.e-lesmag.com and www.e-gaymag.com ... Following the publication of Elizabeth Bradfield’s Interpretive Work, Arktoi Books has come out with its second poetry collection, The Heart’s Traffic, by Ching-In Chen. Arktoi (www.redhen.org/arktoi.asp) is the Red Hen Press imprint specializing in works by lesbian authors…. Poetic Voices Without Borders 2 (Gival Press), edited by Robert L. Giron, includes a sizable number of out gay poets among its 150 contributors… Lethe Press (www.lethepress.com) has reissued R.W. Day’s post-apocalyptic romance, A Strong and Sudden Thaw, which became an online sensation when it first appeared in 2006… Neil S. Plakcy's Mahu Fire is a finalist for the "Hawaii Five-O" Award for best police procedural. Alyson will reissue Mahu Fire next month… Charlie Cochrane is feeling joyful about a rave from Joyfully Reviewed (www.joyfullyreviewed.com) that dubbed her novel, Lessons in Love, “a really good romance with the bonus of a well-written mystery"… Strong reviews have also been garnered by two titles from Seal Press: Labor of Love: One Man’s Extraordinary Pregnancy by Thomas Beatie and Transgender History by Susan Stryker…Seventh Window Publications (www.seventhwindow.com) will finally have a logo, due up on the company web site this month. Coming up for Seventh Window is M.J. Pearson’s new gay romance, Helpless, set during the Oscar Wilde trials, and a reissue of Ten Thick Inches, Kenneth Harrison’s collection of erotic short stories... Yet another first novel from Bella Books: October's Promise, by Marianne Garver (www.mariannegarver.com), which will anchor a romance saga series set in a fictional New Hampshire town. October’s Promise is the first acquisition of Bella’s new editorial director, Karin Kallmaker… After producing a series of gay-themed films from original screenplays by writer/director and co-founder Rob Williams, Guest House Films has optioned the rights to Jim Tushinski’s novel, Van Allen’s Ecstasy. Rob will adapt and direct, and produce with his life partner and Guest House Films co-founder Rodney Johnson and their producing partner Matthew Montgomery… Poet D. A. Powell’s latest compilation, Chronic (Graywolf Press), got a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, which included this: “This fourth collection from Powell is simultaneously an accessible heartbreaker, a rare gem for connoisseurs, a genre-altering breakthrough and a long anticipated follow-up”… On the radio: I was interviewed recently about my latest Benjamin Justice mystery, Spider Season, on Tish Pearlman’s Out of Bounds, which airs on east coast NPR affiliates WEOS-FM and WSKG-FM. Out of Bounds was awarded "Best Public Affairs Program Series" by The New York State Broadcasters Association last year. No podcasts yet, but you can hear Tish’s past interviews with Kate Clinton, Janis Ian, Lesley Gore and other out folks at www.outofboundsradioshow.com.
And now, the Book Buzz Interview, with Modernist Press publisher Stephen Soucy:
Steve Soucy, who lives in Los Angeles, is acquisitions editor for CQ Press, where he signs academic authors to write political science books. He's also the principal of Modernist Press, based in New York and L.A. Steve has published short fiction and sold one screenplay option as he was completing his Masters degree in Professional Writing and Screenwriting at the University of Southern California.
JMW: Last year, you started Modernist Press to publish a book of short stories, 90069: West Hollywood Stories, which you edited, with an introduction by Patricia Nell Warren (and which included a story of mine). Tell us about it and how you put it together.
SS: West Hollywood Stories features stories set within the city and written by gay men, including Ben Scuglia, Joe Symon, Rakesh Satyal, Kyle T. Wilson, Max Pierce, Tim State, Alex Roberts, Felice Picano, Jameson Currier, Paul Cain, Shaun Levin, and first-time writer, Frank Bua. The project was originally slated for publication with Haworth Press but that fell apart when Haworth was purchased by Taylor and Francis. I sent out a proposal for the book to a number of mid-sized companies publishing LGBT literature but came up empty. The book was considered too niche, not a large enough audience. This round of rejections inspired me to launch my own small publishing house, Modernist Press, and 90069: West Hollywood Stories was my first release. (90069 being the zip code for the western section of the city.)
JMW: How did you start? How did you select the authors and make contact?
SS: I personally approached a number of established writers, asking for submissions. Several declined for various reasons but a number of others had a story in their arsenal set in West Hollywood, or an idea for a story, and my invitation gave them a reason to write and/or finish it. I also ran a call for submissions in the Lambda Literary Report. Eventually, I culled 14 stories from about 40 submitted. The book was published just before the West Hollywood Book Fair last September, where I launched it.
JMW: With advances in desktop publishing, E-publishing and print-on-demand (POD), more authors and editors seem to be turning to self-publishing, though it can still be risky and quite daunting. What has your experience been as a neophyte self-publisher?
SS: I went POD with this title, but I don't think I’d go that route again. I worked with iUniverse, because they guaranteed that the book would be produced within the time frame I required. They were difficult to work with in a number of ways, especially communicating about the cover design I wanted. They also have a few up-charges that a writer may not be aware of when he or she first enters into the agreement. It's obviously more difficult to see any profit when you do a book POD, but I wasn't concerned about that. I mainly wanted to bring this first book to market. I promised my authors I would deliver and I made it happen. For some people POD may work great, but I don’t think it's the way to go if you are going to create a list of books. For my next title, I'm going the "traditional" route of a print run, maintaining an inventory, and using the more established modes of distribution. Either way, it’s a lot of hard work.
JMW: So Modernist Press has more projects in the pipeline?
SS: I’m planning another anthology of literary fiction. This one will feature stories that are connected directly to, or inspired by, a work of art, which needs to be a major component of the story. For more details, go to: www.modernistpress.com. Other than that, I'm looking to publish literary fiction and am open to novels, novellas, and short fiction collections.
JMW: As an out editor and publisher, can you see any trends or new directions in the years ahead for LGBT writers and LGBT publishing and distribution?
SS: I think InsightOut Books (mail order and online site) is a solid way for LGBT books to find their audience. West Hollywood Stories will be included there early this year. Online sales of West Hollywood Stories have been strong. The book has sold a few hundred copies via Amazon.com and also on the iUniverse e-commerce site. The book is also in gay bookstores across the country. As far as trends, I'm waiting for something to emerge on the web for writers like it has with new bands or filmmakers, using MySpace and YouTube to attract a following.
JMW: Any advice for LGBT writers on how to better reach their audience?
SS: : Advertise on FaceBook and similar sites. All this social media needs to be utilized. Perhaps start a blog. Finally, keep knocking on doors, keep building a list of credits, even if they are non-traditional. Publishing is expanding in new ways, and there’s room for all of us.
That’s all the Book Buzz for now. So, go read a book!
January, 2009
Nearly two dozen LGBT authors are creating an anthology, I Do, in support of gay equality in marriage, with all profits going to the Lambda Legal fund. Manloveromance Press (www.mlrpress.com) is donating print and distribution costs, and there will also be an e-book, all later this year…With director Gus Van Sant’s Milk still in theaters, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black is getting his due with two Newmarket Press titles: Milk: The Shooting Script and Milk: A Pictorial History of Harvey Milk, which Black put together with a foreword by Armistead Maupin. The latter will be out in late January… Bella Books has acquired the reprint rights to Ellen Hart's Jane Lawless mystery series, which has won five Lambda Literary Awards for best lesbian mystery. Bella will begin reissuing the earliest titles next year… If you want to know more about Tamara Allen’s new historical romance, Whistling in the Dark, Lethe Press (www.lethepressbooks.com) has just posted a web interview with the author. (Our own interview with Lethe Press publisher Steve Berman can be found further down)… The New York Post’s Page Six quoted Howard Bragman on his rise as an entertainment publicist: “I grew up a fat, Jewish, gay guy…In Hollywood, those are the first three rungs up the ladder of success.” Bragman’s autobiography, Where’s My Fifteen Minutes?, is due out about now… Running Press has selected two authors of gay historical romance, Alex Beecroft and Erastes, to launch its new M/M Romance line. Look for Beecroft’s False Colors, set in the Age of Sail, and Erastes’ Transgressions, set during the English Civil War, in April… Lesléa Newman, poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts, not only has a new book of poetry out (Nobody’s Mother, Orchard House Press), she’s just finished a novel, The Reluctant Daughter, which Bold Strokes Books will publish later his year… Poet Steven Reigns has posted a video on www.mylifeispoetry.com featuring LGBT seniors discussing their experience in his autobiographical poetry workshop. Sponsored by the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, it was designed to give voice to rarely heard LGBT seniors, and resulted in a collection, My Life Is Poetry, available through the web site…James Magruder’s short play, Penelope and the Sterile Field, won the 2008 Drama Contest sponsored by Third Coast, a Michigan literary journal. James’ play has been performed in Baltimore, New York, and Atlanta…Speaking of Atlanta, that city’s Dillon Watson is now a first-time novelist with Keile's Chance, which Bella Books will publish this summer. It’s set in Atlanta’s thriving LGBT community…Bella Books has also introduced two other new voices recently. Claire Rooney's first novel, As Far As Far Enough, is already out, with her second novel, The Color of Dust, coming in April. And Bella recently published Whacked, a first mystery by Josie Gordon, featuring an amateur detective who is a lesbian, a soccer fanatic – and an Episcopal priest. It’s intended as a series, with Toasted coming next… Paul G. Bens, Jr., known primarily for his short, dark fiction, has sold his first novel, Kelland, to Casperian Books for publication in the fall…Veteran book reviewer Susanna J. Sturgis is now facing the critics herself with the publication of her first novel, The Mud of the Place (www.themudoftheplace.com), a gay-themed story set on Martha’s Vineyard. Reviewing for the Vineyard Gazette, Holly Nadler praised the novel’s “wealth of characters” and dubbed it “a page-turner”… Tooting my own horn: Spider Season, the latest novel in my Lambda Literary Award-winning Benjamin Justice series, got a rave from Mystery Scene, including this: “This exquisite novel is the finest yet in a powerful series.” To read the first chapter, visit www.johnmorganwilson.com.
And now, the Book Buzz Interview, with Lethe Press publisher Steve Berman:
Steve sold his first short story at age 17. Since then, he's told many a strange and queer tale, in such anthologies as The Fairy Reel, Men of Mystery, and Paper Cities. His debut novel, Vintage made the GLBT Roundtable of the American Library Association's recommended Rainbow List for queer-themed books for young readers. He has edited five anthologies, including the annual series Wilde Stories, and has been a finalist for many awards including the Lambda Literary. He began Lethe Press in 2001.
JMW: Lethe Press publishes both gay and non-gay titles. What percentage of your total catalog would you estimate is gay or LGBT, and how many LGBT titles do you expect to publish in 2009?
SB: Ironically, I never envisioned Lethe as a LGBT press but between releasing the work of good friends and writers orphaned by changes in the industry, by 2007 Lethe had emerged as a player in the field. I would say that roughly 75% of our books are queer-themed. We hope to release over thirty LGBT titles in 2009. Most of these will be reprints of older works, while there should be at least one original work a month.
JMW: In a nutshell, describe what kind of LGBT literature you publish.
SB: Our specialties are inspirational books and speculative fiction (fantasy, horror, and science-fiction). These are two fields that fascinate me because both depend on a sense of wonder. I'm pleased that we're a strong presence in the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards. Lethe has also released and/or reprinted literary collections, mysteries, and a variety of erotica.
JMW: Who would be some of the more recognizable names among your authors in this area?
SB: In the field of inspirational titles, we've released many of Toby Johnson's books, as well as John McNeill's latest, Sex as God Intended, and a reader of Malcolm Boyd's work through the decades, A Prophet in His Own Land. In speculative fiction, we've released anthologies with the work of Lambda Literary Award-winner Richard Bowes, New York Times best-selling author Holly Black, and Hal Duncan, a Scottish writer nominated for the World Fantasy Award. My own novel, Vintage: A Ghost Story, reprinted by Lethe, was a finalist for the Andre Norton Award and Gaylactic Spectrum Award. And we've released work by such critically acclaimed and award-winning authors as Jameson Currier (Still Dancing) and Catherine Lundoff (Crave).
JMW: In the past year you've added two new imprints, White Crane Books and Bear Bones Books. Tell us about White Crane Books first.
SB: White Crane Books is actually a partnership rather than a true imprint. A number of years ago, Toby Johnson introduced me to Bo Young and Dan Vera, the editors of the journal of gay culture, White Crane. It became quickly apparent that we shared a desire to ensure that wonderful books on gay wisdom stay in-print. Our goal with the line of books is to both reprint classic works such as Two Flutes Playing by Andrew Ramer as well as release new material, such as the James White Review. Bo is the lead in all acquisitions for the line.
JMW: And what about Bear Bones Books?
SB: When I volunteered at Giovanni's Room bookstore in Philadelphia, I noticed how many customers might identify with Bear culture. Yet, very few Bear-oriented books ever released. When Ron Suresha, who has long been one of the lead authors and editors in the movement, called me to discuss an imprint of Lethe devoted to releasing titles aimed at Bears and their admirers, I was immediately eager to begin. And one of my favorite authors, Jeff Mann, and I had been in talks to reprint his essay collection, Edge. So that became the first in Bear Bones Books. We have plans for reprinting the other classics in the field as well as new anthologies. Ron serves as acquisitions editor for these books.
JMW: You're expanding at a time when the economy is forcing a number of publishers to cut back and downsize, and others to disappear. Why?
SB: Well, I could say that with print-on-demand technology our costs are relatively low. But the real answer is dedication to the LGBT community. For me, Lethe is not only a business but a means for supporting LGBT authors. So many writers are frustrated that there are fewer and fewer presses that are releasing good, queer books. These individuals have a voice they want shared and, as an author myself, I understand their aspirations. Some gay presses are focused more on the reader. And while satisfying the consumer is always wise in business, I want the authors we release to be content, too.
JMW: Where can readers find Lethe Press books?
SB: Of course the GLBT booksellers carry our books, as do many other independents that are in queer-friendly neighborhoods. Our books are carried by the major wholesalers (ASP, Baker & Taylor, Bookazine, and Ingram), so any retailer can place an order. I don't believe in just online distribution, so I make sure the LGBT books are decently discounted and returnable. That said, we do good business with TLA Books (gay-owned and-operated) and Amazon.com, and many of our books are available as e-books.
JMW: Any special thoughts on the coming year for LGBT readers?
SB: Well, gay marriage is back in the news because of the Proposition 8 debacle. So, no doubt there will be a number of new releases on that subject. What interests me more is the growing number of authors who are releasing mainstream work with incidental LGBT characters. I'm also tracking the post-gay trend in young adult literature. It hasn't quite caught on, but I believe we'll soon see more and more characters who refuse to define themselves by their sexual experiences.
That’s all the Book Buzz for now. So, go read a book!
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