Category Archives: Writer and Reader

“Two Natures” Book Trailer, E-book Sale, New Reviews

Romantic suspense author Zara West (Beneath the Skin) created this stylish book trailer for Two Natures using my storyboard, stock photos, and public domain archival photos from the New York Public Library.

Now through September 28, the e-book of Two Natures is on sale on Amazon Kindle and Apple iBooks for 99 cents! Julian may never be this cheap again…unless you’re a cute boy and buy him another rum and Coke…

I appreciated this insightful review from Kittredge Cherry at Jesus in Love Blog, “Two Natures explores sexuality and spirituality during AIDS crisis”.  Art That Dares, Cherry’s book of feminist and LGBT-themed religious art, helped me envision a God who could accept Julian and me. She writes:

The dense and varied literary coming-of-age novel ranges from comic scenes that could easily become a hit movie to the explicitly sexual and the touchingly tragic. Reiter brings alive LGBTQ touchstones of the era: the visit from out-of-town and out-of-it parents to their closeted son, the AIDS death and awkward funeral, and so on…

…As art historian, I especially enjoyed the way that some of Julian’s spiritual reflections were provoked by art. For instance, Julian’s inner spiritual conflict is portrayed at first through his responses to “Piss Christ,” a controversial photograph by Andres Serrano.

The novel is also significant as an example of how a new generation tries to make sense of an AIDS crisis that they were too young to experience firsthand. I happened to read “Two Natures” at the same time that I was rereading my own journals for an oral history interview about doing AIDS ministry at Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco in the late 1980s. Perhaps no novel can capture the agony, ecstasy and desperate intensity of those times.

Julian never found the kind of LGBTQ-affirming church home that we provided at MCC-SF. Sadly that may be true for many young gay men in the early 1990s, and even now. But there’s good news: Reiter is already working on a sequel. Julian will have another chance to find long-term love and a gay-positive spiritual community, with readers invited along for the ride.

And here’s my latest Goodreads review from T Christopher:

A marvelous book. I enjoyed Julian’s story so much and found it very relatable. There were so many beautiful, little surprises (“Spring Chicken Perfume”) and a great many laugh out loud moments. It brought up a lot of memories for me—young men who had to shoulder more responsibility and grief than was reasonable for their years, and too many who never got to grow up and old. Too many losses. I really appreciate the characterization of Julian—so on the ball in so many ways, and yet so readily apt to drop it. Very realistic.

Reiter is a marvelous writer and this is a rich, wonderful, and heartbreaking, story. I enjoyed reading it very much.

Book Reader Magazine, an e-book promotion site in the Awesomegang affiliate network, ran a brief interview with me this month.

Save the date: My book launch reading will take place on Thursday, Sept. 29, at 7:30 PM, at the Bureau of General Services – Queer Division bookstore in the LGBT Center, 208 W. 13th Street, New York City. I’m honored to share the stage with Charlie Bondhus, winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. See the event listing in Gay City News. RSVP on Facebook.

Julian Gets Around: New “Two Natures” Reviews and Author Interviews

The countdown continues to the launch of Two Natures on September 15! Readings are scheduled for New York City, Northampton, and Greenfield, MA this fall. Watch this space or visit our Facebook page for exact times and directions. With guidance from The Frugal Book Promoter, I’ve garnered some encouraging pre-publication reviews and author interviews online. Here are the latest stops on Julian’s PR tour.

Our Queer Art, a project of Canada’s QueerDeer Media, profiled me on July 27. An excerpt from the interview:

What do you define yourself as? Or do you not? Why/Why not?
I define myself as a creative artist whose medium is writing. A revelatory and sometimes painful aspect of writing Two Natures was facing the truth that this identity is more fundamental than other labels that I thought would fit me forever, including “Christian” and “female”.

How long have you been practicing?
I’ve been a writer since before I could write! I dictated my first poems to my parents when I was about 4. They were about fairy princesses, of course.

What interests you about your medium or why do you use this medium?
I grew up in a family that loved books. The magic of communing with characters from an intangible world was my first, and (I’m finally realizing) my most formative, spiritual experience. It’s a great honor to be able to practice that magic myself.

What kind of work do you want to create, or what work are you inspired by that you would like to strive for/emulate?
I am inspired by artists who challenge binary thinking, whose work offers both sensual pleasure and an intelligent perspective on the human condition. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and The Goldfinch are ambitious in this way: action melodramas that are also philosophical treatises on the troubled relationship between art and morality. So are some of my favorite works of fiction that blend horror and political critique, such as George Saunders’ Pastoralia, Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (a Cthulhu Mythos pastiche set in the Jim Crow South), and Jenna Leigh Evans’ Prosperity (an American dystopia set in debtor’s prison, winner of our 2015 Winning Writers North Street Book Prize for genre fiction). The poetry collections that are touchstones for me include Atlantis by Mark Doty, The Cow by Ariana Reines, Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot, and Live or Die by Anne Sexton.

Trudie Barreras, a popular Amazon Vine reviewer, gave Two Natures a 5-star review on Goodreads:

…[T]his book offers an amazing level of honesty and insight. Like the earlier work of Patricia Nell Warren, Reiter’s representation of gay male psychology and eroticism is clear-eyed and unabashed. Although her descriptions of male-male sexual encounters are no more explicit than the similar descriptions of heterosexual lovemaking in many modern-day romances, some readers may find this unpalatable. To them, I can only say, “Get over it, people!”

Although Reiter is investigating the link between sexuality and spirituality in this narrative, as well as presenting a deeply incisive exploration of the social and cultural aspects of the urban LGBTQ community during the AIDS crisis, she is not heavy-handed or in any way “preachy”. Her main characters and many of the peripheral cast members are sympathetically and vividly described. Julian himself is voiced with wry and biting humor.

A trigger warning: for those who, like me, have “been there and done that” with respect to losing dear ones to AIDS, and who have experienced the anger, disgust and grief resulting from the vicious and callous rejection of gays – especially those stricken with HIV – by the so-called Christian establishment, the honesty of this book is stark…

Book blogger Amos Lassen wrote in this July 13 review:

It is a pleasure to read a novel that is literary in all of its aspects. I also found that the issue of faith that is so important to me is beautifully handled here… We all know someone like Julian and many of us see ourselves in him. The highest praise that I can give this book is to say that ‘I love it’ and I do. Julian is an everyman and in that he is a composite of so many gay personalities. You owe to yourselves to read this wonderful novel.

A.M. Leibowitz, author of the excellent gay Christian novel Passing on Faith and many others, scored Two Natures 10 out of 10 fountain pens in this Aug. 1 review and author interview. She doesn’t let Julian off the hook for his moral failings, though!

This is a difficult book for me to review. On the one hand, despite its length, it’s surprisingly fast-paced. There isn’t a lot of wasted space; everything has a purpose, so it doesn’t feel as though it’s lagging anywhere in terms of moving forward. The writing style is superior, in the style of the best literary fiction. At the same time, my reaction to it is very much along those lines—I’m not here to be entertained by this book. It’s not a feel-good love story or a tale of tragedy-to-triumph. It’s meant to be appreciated mainly for its historical value and technically skilled craftsmanship. For a number of reasons (the heavy topics, the highly literary style, the depth of the psychology), this is one to read with a group for the purpose of discussion.

There’s a lot covered in this novel, and the title says it best. Everything in Julian’s life is split, and he spends most of the story trying to make whole the things he sees as fractured. Despite the fact that there’s a sub-thread about the religion of his youth, it actually doesn’t factor in much beyond his musings until near the end. However, his broken trust in his faith and family of origin drive nearly every other relationship he has. It’s vital for people of faith to read this with the understanding of how religious institutions create and contribute to the oppression specifically of the LGBT community…

…Ultimately, I could probably talk for days about this book because it’s impossible to capture everything about such a dense read in a short review. My own personal grievances with the characters aside, I do think this is a phenomenal work, and I highly recommend it. It should be required reading if for no other reason than that we’ve already forgotten what life was like in those days.

Love Julian or hate him? Pick up a free copy and find out. Join the Goodreads M/M Romance Group and sign up for the “Don’t Buy My Love” giveaway starting August 25! Fifteen e-book copies of Two Natures are on offer in exchange for an honest review.

Advance Praise for “Two Natures” from California Bookwatch

Diane Donovan, editor of Midwest Book Review’s California Bookwatch and proprietor of Donovan’s Literary Services, sent me this great review of my forthcoming novel, Two Natures (Saddle Road Press, September 2016). It’ll go up on their websites in July.

***

Julian is a Southern boy and transplanted aspiring fashion photographer in New York City in the 1990s;  a gay man facing the height of the AIDS epidemic and professional, social, and spiritual struggles alike as he questions himself, God’s will, and Christian values in the advent of a specific kind of apocalypse.

It’s rare to discover within a gay love story an equally-powerful undercurrent of political and spiritual examination. Too many gay novels focus on evolving sexuality or love and skim over underlying religious values systems; but one of the special attributes of Two Natures isn’t just its focus on duality, but its intense revelations about what it means to be both Christian and gay.

In many ways, Julian is the epitome of a powerful, conflicting blend of emotions. Take the story’s opening line, for one example. Readers might not anticipate a photographer’s nightmare which bleeds heavily into evolving social realization and philosophy: “I woke from another nightmare about photographing a wedding. The bride was very loud and everyone’s red lipstick was smeared across their teeth like vampires, except vampires would never wear lavender taffeta prom dresses. It’s always the wrong people who can’t see themselves in mirrors.”

Even the language exquisitely portrays this dichotomy: Julian’s parents are still “Mama” and “Daddy”, his language and many of his attitudes remain delightfully Southern (“You know, back where I come from, that was the first thing you asked a new fellow: what does your Daddy do, and where do you go to church?“), and his experiences with men, female friends, his evolving photography career, and life in general are wonderfully depicted, drawing readers into not just the trappings and essence of his life, but the course of his psychological, philosophical and spiritual examinations.

As Julian explores this world, readers should expect sexually graphic (but well-done) scenes designed to enhance the storyline (not shock it with departures or dominant heaviness), an attention to the social and political environment of the 90s that swirls around Julian and changes his perspectives and decisions, and a gritty set of candid descriptions that probe real-world experience.

Readers of gay fiction seeking more than a casual series of insights into the world of New York City’s culture, enhanced by the deeper perspectives of a young man who spiritually struggles to find his place even as he fine-tunes his career and life, will welcome the close inspection of truth, love, and life provided in Jendi Reiter’s Two Natures, powerful saga of Southern etiquette and perspectives turned upside down and the risks involved in moving beyond one’s safe zone.

 

Book Notes: The Doll Collection

doll_collection_cover“Not just toys, dolls signify much more than childhood,” writes poet Nicole Cooley in her introduction to The Doll Collection (Terrapin Books, 2016), a rich and complex anthology of doll-themed contemporary poetry edited by Diane Lockward. Dolls are imbued with our powerful, contradictory feelings about gender, race, class, mortality, and innocence. “Symbols of perfection, they both comfort and terrify… They are objects we recall with intense nostalgia but also bodies we dismember and destroy.”

Collecting dolls has been as much of a constant in my life as writing poetry. Both pursuits take me to the realm of imagination, where one is never “too grown-up” to communicate with one’s fantasies and fears. I was honored to have my poem “The Fear of Puppets and the Fear of Beautiful Women” included in this anthology, together with notable writers such as Denise Duhamel, Jeffrey Harrison, Enid Shomer, Cecilia Woloch, and many more.

The book stands out for its diverse cast of characters from doll history. Alongside the well-known Barbie, GI Joe, Mr. Potato Head, Ginny, and Raggedy Ann, we meet paper dolls of the Dionne Quintuplets, blow-up sex toys, jewel-box ballerinas, anatomical models, artists’ miniatures, teddy bears, and baby dolls in many stages of porcelain perfection or grotesque dismemberment. Dolls are burned, smashed, stolen, repaired, reconstituted like Frankenstein. They are preserved in museums, or in the homes of their now-grown owners, as a focal point for sweet or regretful family memories. The dolls in these poems remind us of love or its hard unsatisfying simulacrum, of fragility or a taunting imperviousness to time and loss.

“The dolls/are always being picked up and placed/by forces outside their control./Words are put into their mouths,” writes Elaine Terranova in the poem “Secrets”. Dolls give us the opportunity to act out both sides of the power dynamic, to identify with early memories of helplessness or vent our rage on someone who can’t really feel it…can she?

Several selections voiced the feelings of children confused or stifled by an adult agenda. “I was the live birth after the stillborn/one, crowned to be Mother’s little doll,” says the speaker of Joan Mazza’s “Little Doll”. Comparing herself to the identically-dressed doll children in her carriage, she says, “Undressed, baby dolls had smooth bodies,/no crevices. I’d be perfect, never play,/an untouched doll, if mother had her way.” By the poem’s end, “mother” is lowercase, suggesting the young girl’s rebellion. Michael Waters’ “Burning the Dolls” starts from a poignant historical anecdote: “In 1851, in John Humphrey Noyes’ free-love settlement in Oneida, New York, the communally-raised children, encouraged by the adults, voted to burn their dolls as representative of the traditional role of motherhood.” The child narrator lays her beloved rag doll on the pyre, but a lot more goes up in flames: “when her varnished face burst/in the furnace of my soul,/the waxy lips forever lost,//then I knew I’d no longer pray,/even with fire haunting me…”

Conversely, for some other poets, dolls represented childhood feelings of safety and trust, which the adult speakers wish they could recapture. In “When Catholics Believed in Limbo”, Mary Ellen Talley recalls a simple faith that led her and her friends to baptize her Little Women dolls. Lee Upton’s “To Be Blameless Is to Be Miniature” searches for a way back in to the dolls’ perfect world: “No one sleeps./No one gets comfortable here./You cannot stand inside innocence.” Alison Townsend begins her prose-poem “Madame Alexander’s Amy” with the line, “Two weeks after my mother’s death, the doll was waiting under the tree.” The speaker wanted to love this last gift from her mother, and in a way she did, but the doll (which she still owns) was also “an emissary from the country of death to tell me that childhood was over, and she was the last plaything”.

David Trinidad’s “Playing with Dolls” and Scott Wiggerman’s “Playing GI Joes” show the awakening of a gay identity through breaking the gender boundaries around toys. While Trinidad’s sestina ends sadly, with his parents forbidding him to play with his sisters’ Barbies (“You’re a boy”), we know he gets the last laugh because he’s now a well-regarded gay poet. Wiggerman’s delightful narrative reveals how hyper-macho toys have a homoerotic side just waiting for the right person to bring it out. His GI Joe likes “hot little loincloths attached with a pin” and volunteers for missions where he’ll be stripped and put into bondage. “Tied up, disciplined, tortured into a frenzy,/he was a master of man-to-man endurance,/revealing only name, rank, and serial number,/as a sly grin edged toward the scar on his cheek,/a mark that covered so many of our secrets.”

These are just a few highlights. Doll aficionados will find their own favorites in this must-have collection of 80+ poems about our uncanny little friends.

doll_collection_book_1

Olivia, Agnes, and Emily approve of this book.

doll_collection_book_2

A new soldier in town impresses Rose Sauvage-Grimpante with his interest in poetry.

Winners of the 2016 ASPS David Kato Prize for LGBT-Themed Poetry

David Kato was an Ugandan activist for the rights of sexual minorities, who was killed in a probable hate crime in 2011. For several years since then, I’ve sponsored this prize for poems on the theme of LGBT human rights, as part of the Alabama State Poetry Society award series. Thanks to award coordinator Jerri Hardesty, 2016 First Prize winner Christine Riddle, and Third Prize winner Lynn Veach Sadler, for permission to reprint these winning entries. (The last line of each stanza of Christine’s poem is indented; apologies if that does not show up properly on this blog template.)

Defixio in the Heartland
by Christine Riddle

A curse tablet or binding spell (‘defixio’ in Latin) is a type of curse found throughout the Graeco-Roman world, in which someone would ask the gods to do harm to others. These texts were typically scratched on very thin sheets of lead in tiny letters, then placed in tombs or nailed to the walls of temples. Some texts do not invoke the gods, but merely list the target of the curse, the crime and the intended ill to befall them.

Elvis is dead,
and Barney and Floyd,
Bella, Princess, and Ethel.
And Buddy, still wobbly on legs one week old,
and Love, ironically, full with foal.

Epona alone the vigil kept
that Paschal eve. As Lucifer crept
from stall to stall,
she crafted from her cloak nine palls.
With roses white she plaited manes,
anointed with her tears each blaze,
fed them apples from her lap,
and stroked the cat.

But where was god that Easter morn
when daybreak found the stable door,
when dawn exposed the binding spell,
seared and scorched but legible,
“FAGGOTS ARE FREAKS” “BURN IN HELL”,
when loving a man was deemed the sin
that sparked the blaze made starlight dim,
and trapped the innocents within?

I’d like to think that at sunrise,
to consecrate the sacrifice,
as feathered cantors’ chants arose
he joined the blessed requiem
amid the smoldering skeletons,
and sang their spirits home again.
And sang their spirits home.

****

He/She
by Lynn Veach Sadler

He was my mentee in poetry.
A brilliant nerd, IT Specialist.
I was the first to cotton to the coming change,
had some small part in helping prepare the way,
was proud that a computer whiz would be female,
that a poet would have the opportunity
to live and sing the lives of male and female.

People talked, pointed fingers,
Though he had been appreciated, even loved,
for his long hours, individual help,
extraordinary expertise…

He/She was quiet, dignified,
kept all under wraps as those in power cautioned
until consent was gained to show herself
in heels, wig, dress…And she was (is) beautiful.

All seemed well when my husband and I moved away.
Then I heard that she’d been fired. I quested,
learned the story from her, was pledged to secrecy
but know the hurt, the plunge not just to ignominy
but poverty. She’s doing whatever job she can find,
now wearing Stoic, intent upon surviving
(will survive if worth and goodness have their day).
Will funding be found to complete the change?

We received a Christmas card from a friend
at the place we moved from,
the place where He/She used to work.
Among the enclosed messages was this:
He/She “got fired because of her alleged
inclination to watch porno on the computer.”
Not so!

Book Review Roundup: They Tried to Make Me Go to Rehab

Welcome back, readers. Blogging has been light this month while I prepare my Two Natures galleys for submission to book review journals. If you are a reviewer and would like an advance reading copy (Kindle edition), email me.

I’ve read more good books this spring than I’ve had time to blog about individually, so in the next few weeks, I’ll be posting some roundups of books-in-brief, grouped around various themes.

If you want to scare your teenagers away from alcohol and drugs, Gil Fagiani’s new poetry collection Logos (Guernica Editions, 2016) and Eve Tushnet’s debut novel Amends (CreateSpace, 2015) present a brutally honest and unglamorous look at addiction and the difficulties of recovery. And they’re much funnier, and better-written, than any PSA.

Logos is a collection of persona poems set at a heroin treatment center of that name, in the South Bronx in the 1960s. It comes out of Fagiani’s own experience, first as an inpatient there, and later as a social worker at a Bronx psychiatric hospital and the director of a rehab center in Brooklyn. The desperation of addiction has a way of levelling distinctions between races, classes, and professional backgrounds. The first-person narrator of some of these poems, presumably a stand-in for the poet’s younger self, stepped off the privileged path of a military college cadet to do anti-poverty activism in Spanish Harlem, where he got caught up in the drug culture. But his delusional, hand-to-mouth life is no different from the teen prostitutes and con men who are rooting through the same garbage cans for the dregs of liquor bottles. In this poetry collection, Fagiani expresses gratitude for the program that turned his life around, while showing that its zero-tolerance methods condemned some other residents to fall back into deadly habits.

“Logos” is a traditional term for the Godhead in Christian theology, based on the description of Jesus as the divine Word in the Gospel of John. However, the only god in evidence for most of the poor souls in this treatment center is the director, nicknamed “The Great Him”, who justifies his humiliating punishment regime on the grounds that addicts are all manipulative, self-centered liars who need to be tough-loved into submission. As Fagiani notes in the introduction, Logos was a peer-led community inspired by Chuck Dederich’s Synanon, which used confrontational “encounter sessions” to “strip down a person’s defense mechanisms to uncover the real person.”

Tushnet’s Amends takes aim at this very notion that the self is some nugget of sincerity we can excavate from the dross of social performance, rather than something we construct–and reveal to ourselves–in the act of choosing which personae to perform. In troubling our moralistic judgments about surface and depth, and in the humane values underpinning her aphoristic wit, she shows herself to be an aesthetic heir to Oscar Wilde.

The premise of Amends is pure 21st-century but its concerns are as old as the Garden of Eden. A half-dozen alcoholics from all walks of life are selected for a reality-TV show set in a residential rehab clinic. When healing and repentance become co-opted into the postmodern performance of identity, is transformative grace still possible? Sometimes, incredibly, it is, but not always, and not in a fashion that anyone associated with the show could control or predict.

Tushnet, a popular blogger on Catholic sexual ethics, is (for the most part) an equal-opportunity satirist. The Christian doubletalk of crisis pregnancy centers, pretentious queer theater, and aging Young Turk neo-conservative columnists are all grist for her mill. Her indictment of our society is sharp, yet love can still break through our egotistic illusions, as in the poignant, redemptive “bromance” between Gair, a celibate gay Christian athlete, and Dylan, his straight frat-boy best friend, whose drunken antics become less adorable as he ages.

In my opinion, the only flaw in this hilarious and heartbreaking novel is the character Sharptooth, a whiny young woman who identifies as a wolf. She is depicted rather two-dimentionally with all of the insulting stereotypes typically leveled at fringe identities–basically, a phony who wants to call attention to herself because strange identities are trendy and allow you to win power struggles by calling the other person an oppressor. However, “otherkin” is a real identity category that some people sincerely believe applies to them, a fact that most of Tushnet’s readers probably don’t know. To me it seemed like “punching-down” humor to mock a group of people who rarely have any positive representation to counter this depiction. Whatever you think of otherkin, I felt some vicarious shame whenever she came onstage, because trauma survivors and genderqueer people are often silenced with the same caricature that we just want to be treated like special snowflakes. Nonetheless, I highly recommend this book. Read it for the jokes, stay for the grace.

“Jerusalem Cycle” Revisited: This Poet’s Wish for Peace

I wrote the following poem in response to newspaper articles about the Second Intifada (2000-05). From the still-raging conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, to the dreadful news of the terrorist bombings in Brussels this week, it seems that the cell phones of the dead never stop ringing, and desperate people never stop killing and dying for their political visions. Though my family heritage gives me a visceral concern for the survival of the Jewish state, I made every effort in this poem to give a balanced voice to the Palestinians suffering from Israel’s human rights abuses. May there be peace and an end to prejudice.

This poem was first published in Clackamas Literary Review (2003).

Jerusalem Cycle: April 2002

I

The phones of the dead are ringing
as pale men in black vests
gather them into plastic sacks
methodically as bone collectors
for centuries in this holy desert
have hunted the bodies of the past.
The shoes of the dead are bewildered.
They were humble, being shoes,
only wanting to help the dead,
who weren’t dead yet, walk safely from synagogue
to café to bus stop; they never asked
to be flung into flight
and lodged like crows in a tree
beside the peeled bus.
The toys of the dead are grinning like warriors:
no explosion can shake their focus,
bright fur in the gutter, mud over one glossy eye.
The newspapers of the dead are a thousand shot cranes.
The phones of the dead are ringing and ringing
like mad birds in a sack.
One by one their shrilling
will be cut off by the touch of a button
and someone, always the wrong voice, will answer.

II

I had a clay house and now it is gone.
Tanks laid the land bare and rational.
But who doesn’t harbor a guilty one

in her heart, a dark son
with a stone in his fist, secret Ishmael?
The baby was coming and now it is gone,

his head cresting red and hopeless as the sun
while rubble blocked the passage to the hospital
as if it might harbor a guilty one

sleeping dangerous as Jesus in his tomb.
The donkey walks the same path to the well
and circles back, forgetting that they’re gone —

water, house, memory. Only the gun,
the moment that is its own rationale.
How quickly this clay house is gone.
Send forth the brave, the guilty one.

III

For you were a stranger in Egypt,
enslaved by heat, alien vowels
like sharp seeds on your tongue.
Asking for only a crack
in this prayer wall
to shade from the sun
your white unwritten skin.
A stranger in Israel,
returned to glean a heritage
like porridge spilled in the dust
by a regretful Esau,
asking too late for the blessing.
So you died at this table
at a seder in Netanya,
another suicide bombing,
your dinner knife embedded in the ceiling
left behind by the practiced men who hosed
next day the floor clean of blood and prophet’s wine.

IV

Everyone has a right to the morning.
Today I will not be a girl.
I will strap on death like a cock and go riding.

Maybe it will be on the foolish bus
that my heart will flame like a can of petrol,
or dismounting at the market, the dusty place

where you burned your black shadow on the wall,
Ayat, sister. You were spent like a bullet,
like a coin, unsentimental.

A coin’s only worth is in what it buys.
The soft enemy mourns the loss of his own
but we celebrate when another martyr dies.

I am wrapped with nails like a prickly pear.
No one spies me moving stiffly as a robot.
Ayat, we played with dolls and combed our hair

and dreamed of something. What did the land
mean to us? Our mothers pouring tea
in the kitchen, nights listening to the sand

whisper outside our bedroom window,
and nothing dangerous in the distance —
a world without anything we know,

without bulldozers, without checkpoints. Children old
like us, dying. Now my foot is on the bus.
I am paying the toll.

Did it hurt very much when you split apart?
Was it worse than childbirth? I need you
to tell me it’ll be all right,

this maidenhood I’m losing, the last touching
I’ll ever know. Oh, Ayat, you died and left me
here among the useless living.

V

if you had led us out of Egypt
and not fed us with manna in the desert,
Dayenu (it would have been enough)

if you had fed us through the desert
and not offered us your law
Dayenu, Dayenu

if you had not led us
out of fear and scattering
out of every fatherland
floods of hair, quarries of teeth
ashes
falling like dew into the dead pit

out of the icy gulag, the grey agreement
marching into the future
where looters now loll in furs
the end of the hammer dream

even out of the soft cradle
of the Christian smile,
this most expansive host land
of buttery fields and wind-up monuments
wakes up! to find us departed
from their streets and comic books,
every bearded judge and fish-fingered peddler,
leaving silver holes in their movies

if you had laid on us your law
and not led us into the land of Israel
Dayenu

even when G-d promises, bring a knife

who are these that stand on line for water
whose children are stones rising
like the desert they want one thing
like the sun they will burn it all to bone

who has negotiated with the desert,
or shared a bed with the sun?

if you had given us the land
and not given us peace

and not given us peace

The Dark Door: C.M. Royer’s Spiritual Abuse Survivor Memoir

I owe Caleigh Royer a debt of gratitude because her blog inspired me to start studying Tarot last year. I found her online some years ago through one of the spiritual abuse survivor blogs for ex-fundamentalist Christians, probably No Longer Quivering or Love, Joy, Feminism. When I saw on her Facebook page that she was writing a memoir about her journey to independence, I eagerly pre-ordered the e-book of The Dark Door, and was not disappointed. In fact, though I thought I’d worked through most of those old memories of my oppressive upbringing, Royer’s sincere, vulnerable storytelling went straight to my heart and reminded me of the pain and fear of living with narcissistic parents.

Royer is only in her mid-20s but she is strong and wise beyond her years. The Dark Door recounts her break for independence at age 18 when she dared to fall in love with and marry a young man against her parents’ wishes, and her subsequent de-conversion from Christianity as she processed the ways that religion had been used to keep her under her abusive father’s thumb. Unlike some of the other bloggers in this genre, she did not become a rationalist or atheist, but instead is developing a personal spiritual practice based on psychic intuition, spirit guides, Tarot, and universal values of love and fairness.

What’s striking is how much our stories have in common, despite the different religious backgrounds. Abusive families are depressingly alike, regardless of ideology, and a dysfunctional religious community is just the family system writ large.

Caleigh grew up in a fundamentalist subculture where fathers had spiritual “headship” over their families. A girl could not spend time with, let alone date or marry, a boy unless her father gave permission. As the oldest daughter in a large family, she was pressed into the role of caretaker and disciplinarian for her siblings. It didn’t matter what her own dreams and interests were. Because of their patriarchal belief system, the church elders gave the family no support in dealing with her father’s violence and pornography addiction. Caleigh was required to submit to his will no matter what. When she fell in love with a young man from their church, she was in for the fight of her life–which she won, at the price of severing ties with her biological family. It didn’t seem that her father had any basis for objecting to her engagement to Phil; the man simply craved total control over his child’s life, which was threatened when she found another object for her affections. This reminded me of how it drove my bio mom completely mad when I found the man I would marry, and later when we planned to have a child. Narcissists hate competition.

After she and Phil succeeded in getting married, with his parents’ support, the honeymoon period was overshadowed by her chronic illness (eventually diagnosed as fibromyalgia) and depression in the aftermath of trauma. She was insightful and brave enough to realize that she needed therapy to change the bad patterns she’d learned at home. Reading this part, I thought of the brilliant closing moments of the film The Graduate, where Elaine and Ben’s elation at pulling off their romantic escape from her mother turns to shell-shock and withdrawal from one another. Once the adrenaline rush of battle subsides, perhaps they start to doubt whether they can break their parents’ pattern and have a happy marriage, and the programmed guilt of filial disloyalty kicks in. All of this happened to me as a new bride.

I can also relate to the heartbreak of her realization that the religion that had sustained her in the depths of her abuse was no longer the right place for her to continue her healing. She went through guilt, bereavement, fear of the unknown, and fear of disappointing and losing her friends, but never stopped testing the evidence and logic for Bible-based Christianity as she’d always understood it. Ultimately she concluded that for her, the Christian God was too intertwined with the image of her earthly father and the male religious authorities who’d justified his abuse. That isn’t really my issue, but some of her other reasons completely hit home for me. Trauma healing for both of us has meant valuing ourselves and trusting our personal experience, which puts us in conflict with the authority-based, self-sacrificing worldview of historic Christianity.

“There was no place for a story that ends badly in Christianity,” Royer observes, recounting how her church small groups couldn’t handle her abuse narrative. It posed too much of a challenge to their sentimental ideal of family. After she de-converted, she felt relief that “I no longer felt any obligation to apologize for being angry. I could be angry at my parents and their abuse without being reminded to forgive ‘as God has forgiven you.’ I was free to take responsibility for my own thoughts and actions and I had no fear of offending an unseen God.”

A little further on in this account, she says that “To trust my gut was the least Christian thing I could do. I was told it was trusting myself instead of God.” One can certainly see how predators could deploy this doctrine to suppress their victims’ warning signals. In my progressive church culture, I haven’t found such a stark opposition between revealed and empirical knowledge, but to my mind we emphasize external political or charitable activities at the expense of teaching people to cultivate their spiritual discernment. Mystical intuition is not denigrated so much as neglected, and somewhat limited by what can be plausibly squared with the Bible. I’m with Caleigh when she says, “Reaching into Tarot has healed the distrust I had in myself.”

Royer is a young self-taught author whose style is simple and direct. The memoir had some recurring grammatical errors and typos, which one more round of copy-editing would have cured. But if this story resonates with you at all, you won’t mind the rough patches. Get yourself a copy today.

“Two Natures” Cover Reveal!

AppleMark

Many thanks to Don Mitchell at Saddle Road Press for creating this gorgeous photo montage and patiently working with me through a dozen revisions.

From the publisher’s website: “This big, genre-bending, spiritual coming-of-age novel focuses on Julian Selkirk, a young gay fashion photographer in New York City in the early 1990s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Vivid social realism, enriched by unforgettable characters, eroticism, and wit, make this a satisfying read of the highest sort.”

Want an advance reading copy? Email me or contact the publisher. Print and Kindle editions available.

March Links Roundup: Sex God

This week I had another lesson with my Tarot teacher, who has also been trained as a Christian spiritual director. We were talking about the ways my community ties have shifted, and sometimes broken, because my writing is up-front about sensitive topics like abuse, queer sexuality, and faith. I’ve been disappointed that even some openly gay writers feel obliged to keep their “brand image” respectable and G-rated. My teacher asked me, “Why do you write about sex?”

Believe me, no one could be more surprised than I am about the changes in my work and worldview. I often joke that my husband and I were the only two non-Orthodox people in Manhattan who saved ourselves for marriage. That was the right choice for us: we needed a sacred boundary around our love to defend it from callous hookup culture and smothering family dynamics. But as I grew up and had genuine friendships with other adults who’d made different choices, I began to doubt the universal rightness of my conservative sexual ethic. People with a more extroverted temperament and different family history might be happier taking risks that I’d avoided. I have the kind of overly porous empath personality that needs to be cautious about intimacy (sexual or otherwise) with new people, but the downside is that I miss out on the carefree enjoyment of trusting my fellow humans.

I sensed that the fearful and judgmental notes in my sexual ethic were becoming too dominant, so I set out to write fiction about someone completely different from me: Julian, a handsome man with great social skills, who could pursue ecstasy and intimacy without fear of rape culture, pregnancy, or being laughed at because of his wobbly thighs. I took seriously C.S. Lewis’s observation that the sins of sensual excess may be more innocent than the cold pride of the ascetic. The former person is at least seeking the good things of God, love and beauty, albeit in a lower form, while the latter shuts himself off from the life force entirely. I discovered that Julian’s resilient courage to love and love again was a better definition of holiness than “thou shalt not taste, thou shalt not touch”.

Writing about sex as a path to Spirit put me in touch with the life force in my body in a new way. I gradually realized how disconnected I had been from my sensual power. As I’ve written here before, affirming the truth of my embodied experience in arguments with anti-gay Christians primed me to notice that I’d been gaslighted about my experience of abuse, too.

Moreover, in researching Julian’s novel, I met spiritually mature and committed gay male couples who were in open relationships, a common reality that is still a bridge too far for the liberal church’s vision of gay Christian marriage. A new friend of mine, who is a genderqueer Christian, noted wryly that the Trinitarian God is in a plural intimate relationship with Godself that invites everyone in the world to join–talk about polyamory! (See my 2009 post, “I’m in an Open Relationship with Jesus”.)

Sex, like every other interpersonal activity, needs healthy boundaries, compassion, and self-awareness. But we often set those boundaries unconsciously and rigidly, based on bad theology that may be distorting many other areas of our lives as well. I write about sex to start a better conversation about these issues. And because it’s fun, of course.

This leads me into the link that inspired this post. (You were wondering when we were going to get there, already?) KC Slack, a Unitarian Universalist ministry student, shares this lively and provocative essay on Harlot Media: “I Love God and I Love Fucking”. She talks about why she sees no contradiction between her faith and her queer, womanist, polyamorous sexuality. As I said, it probably wouldn’t be the best way for me to live, but these passages were a perfect answer to my Tarot director’s question:

In almost the exact opposite way that many take on a practice of meditation to free themselves from their physical body to find something beyond, I like to sink in to my experience. To find what’s transcendent in the particulars of here and now, of my body and of physical sensations…

…My theology is focused on the particular, on the experience of being in the world, on the margins. In theology we talk about the Wesleyan Quadrilateral: a methodological approach to theological reflection that understands all theological work to have four sources: scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. Most of the time this quadrilateral is understood to be in order of importance–I strive to flip that. Experience of the world, of God, and of God in the world is the primary source for my theology and my faith.

I experience the world from my particular, then I reason and read others’ experiences and contextualize, then I consider tradition and scripture in light of what my body and my life know.

God is important to me and I believe that if I wish to know God, I need to really know myself and know other people in a variety of contexts. Connection is important; even the most casual sex is a type of connection. That window of knowing other people is special, not just in the moments of discussion afterwards, but in each moment.

People feel, smell, taste, act, look different from one another; sex can be a way to experience people in a level of detail we otherwise aren’t privy to. I’m interested in sex as a particular way of knowing; in fucking as both pleasurable experience and a way of deepening my connection to the world. Each partner is a new perspective, a new approach to connection that lets me know more about connection as a concept.

Turning to a less fun but equally taboo topic, I appreciated this article on the literary denigration of writing about trauma. On Brevity Magazine’s blog, award-winning essayist Kelly Sundberg asks rhetorically, “Can Confessional Writing Be Literary?” The answer seems to depend on whether the gatekeepers of “literary” prestige are willing to step outside their privilege or self-protective denial, and believe women’s stories of gendered violence. Sundberg also gives good advice about transforming a difficult personal story into something universal or educational for the reader.

When I sit down to write literary writing about my trauma, I am a writer first, and a trauma survivor second, but I am not ever not a trauma survivor, and as such, I am often interested in examining the roots and effects of my own trauma. Sometimes, I am interested in examining these effects in ways that might be considered therapeutic—that dastardly term that literary nonfiction writers hate. As a result, I have created a separate writing space—my blog—where the writing is not about my craft, but rather, about my story. The blog is where I talk about my journey of recovery, and the blog frees up my emotional space and intellect, so that I can approach my literary writing with more remove and thoughtfulness. Like most literary writers, I do not believe that literary writing should be therapeutic. When I teach creative nonfiction workshops, I tell my students that the therapy needs to come before the writing.

Describing feedback she received when shopping her memoir of surviving domestic abuse, Sundberg laments the pressure to give such tales a “redemptive ending”–a cliché move that may make them more palatable to the average book-buyer but ironically threatens their literary status. She objects to the backlash that accuses trauma memoir writers of attention-seeking. (As I’ve found with my writing about sex, people love to project bad motives onto an author who raises a topic they’d like to ignore.) Sundberg replies:

…I am not grateful for my wounds…I am also not redeemed by them. My wounds are simply a part of my existence. Still, because I am interested in an examination of the self, my wounds have, naturally, become a subject of my writing.

…The story is important, but it must also be written with craft, and with nuance. I have no desire to always write about trauma, nor have I always written about trauma, but I am fatigued by the notion that narratives of trauma are rewarded simply on the merits of the struggle that one has endured. I had a traumatic experience, and perhaps that did gain me entrance into a club—a club of women’s pain—but that traumatic experience did not make me a literary writer. My hard work and my craft are what have, hopefully, made me into a literary writer.

Look for her memoir, Goodbye Sweet Girl, from HarperCollins in 2017.