Coming out doesn’t make you at home in the world; nor, certainly, does sex. You need bonds beyond sex: a community, a culture, a shared set of obsessions. “Love on the March,” Alex Ross, The New Yorker 11/12/12 When I was a young lesbian in rural New Jersey in the ‘70s, I was completely lost […]
Tag: Women Writers
Sappho’s Series of Lesbian Poets: Naomi Replansky’s Answer to Alienation
Do we read poems searching for answers? Do we write poems searching for answers? In the case of Naomi Replansky, yes and yes.
The Ms. Q&A: Inside Mathangi Subramanian’s History of Heaven
“If I’m being totally honest, I wrote this book for myself. Like I keep saying: I am an immigrant and a woman of color and I’ve got some stuff to work through.”
Sappho’s Series of Lesbian Poets: Vi Khi Nao’s Body of Language
Vi Khi Nao is a prolific, prize-winning author working in poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration.We talked about her two “sapphic” books—The Vanishing Point of Desire and Swans in Half-Mourning—and, knowing she’d give me brilliant answers, I also asked her two questions almost impossible to answer.
“She Who Shouts Gets Heard!” Lesbian Learning and Societal Learnings
Learning is a reciprocal, life-long process. Elders learn from young people who bring new experiences and new knowledges to us all. Learning is multifaceted and continuous; all of us at every different age learn together and from one another.
The Ms. Q&A: #RageBakers Katherine Alford and Kathy Gunst Have the Recipe for Resistance
“We wanted to use our skills—both as food journalists, writers, editors and part of a community of women—to help create a book that provides hope.”
The Ms. Q&A: Inside Lynn Melnick’s “Landscape with Sex and Violence”
” I hear a lot about how intense my book is and I’m like, yeah! It’s intense living in rape culture! But I also hear from scores of people about what my book has meant, how it has made people feel companioned, and that fills my heart.”
What Pauline Kael Said
In 2019, a study found that women made up only 34 percent of all film reviewers. One century before, in 1919, Pauline Kael, the female movie critic at The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991 who is also considered one of the leading film critics of all time, was born.
The Ms. Q&A: The Black, Feminist Subtext of Melanie S. Hatter’s Award-Winning Novel “Malawi’s Sisters”
“It was almost like they were saying, ‘okay, this is our story, we had a sister and this is similar to what happened to us.'”
The Radical Feminist Possibility of the Shakespearean Sonnet
We assume that William Shakespeare invented the Shakespearean sonnet—but what if Mary Sidney did instead?