gwynnega

I'm still jetlagged (I swear, I only adjusted to Wisconsin time just when it was time to come home again!), so this will be rambly and partial.

I don't think I went to as much programming this year as at previous Wiscons--partly because I was dealing with bad headaches on a couple of the days. My favorite panel was probably "De-Gaying and Whitewashing: What Publishing Trends Mean for Writers" (with Mary Anne Mohanraj, Liz Gorinsky, Andrea Hairston, Malinda Lo, and Neesha Meminger). I was happy to finally be on a panel with oracne ("Short Stories vs Novels," which was a lot of fun), and also to have Tibetan food with her!

My favorite reading was rose_lemberg's awesome The Moment of Change feminist SFF poetry open mic at Michelangelo's, featuring Rose, cafenowhere, shadesong, britmandelo and others. (Also, Michelangelo's provided very good brownies.)

Andrea Hairston's Guest of Honor speech/performance was beautiful and inspiring (punctuated by the Star Trek theme song).

Favorite food of the con: probably brunch at Bluephies with nwhepcat. (Runner up: the amazing chocolate cake with raspberry sauce which I get every year at the dessert salon.)

Books/publications I bought at Wiscon (many of 'em from Aqueduct Press):

The Wiscon Chronicles vol. 6: Futures of Feminism and Fandom, ed. Alexis Lothian
The Moment of Change: An Anthology of Feminist Speculative Poetry, ed. Rose Lemberg
Here We Cross: a collection of queer & genderfluid poetry from Stone Telling 1-7, ed. Rose Lemberg
Unruly Islands by Liz Henry
Oracle Gretel (chapbook) by Julia Rios
Impolitic! by Andrea Hairston and Debbie Notkin
We Wuz Pushed: On Joanna Russ and Radical Truth-Telling by Brit Mandelo
and the April 2012 issue of The Cascadia Subduction Zone

Clothes I lost and gained: I lost my purple cardigan on Monday sometime between lunch in the hotel restaurant and going upstairs to my room. I was in a headachy exhaustion haze at that point, so maybe I dropped it somewhere? Anyway, the hotel has my info, should it turn up. But at the Gathering, ellen_kushner had handed me a pair of black trousers with multicolored vertical stripes and pronounced them mine. I thought, But they're not my size or my style!--but tried them on and discovered they fit me perfectly and looked exactly my style. Also, nwhepcat gave me a beautiful rose-colored tie-dyed scarf. (But I still want my cardigan back!)

As always for me, the best part of Wiscon was the people--getting to see old and new friends, sharing fun and inspiration.

Poet Adrienne Rich, 82, has died

In 1983, for my final high school semester, I ended up taking a controversial Women's Studies class (because the class I'd wanted to take had been canceled). It was my introduction to feminism, and it changed my life. Among the books on the syllabus were Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language and On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Both of them changed the way I thought about writing and the world--and "Twenty-one Love Poems" in particular amazed me (and still amazes me) with its beauty.

I saw Rich read her poetry twice. The first time was in the late '80s at Bread & Roses Bookstore. (I remember I'd come to the bookstore straight from a full day of defending women's health clinics against the harassment of Operation Rescue. The more things change...). The second time was in 1991 at Sisterhood Bookstore, when An Atlas of the Difficult World had just come out. Both bookstores are now gone, and now so is she. It's hard for me to fathom, when I've spent so many years reading and rereading her poetry and nonfiction--so many years being entranced and infuriated and engaged by her work.

Before dinnertime last night I picked up the copy of Alison Bechdel's graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic that I'd recently purchased at Neighborhood Comic Book Shop--and the book would not let me go. I read it cover to cover, with breaks for dinner/Ryan's Hope and for chapter four revision. I finished reading around 1:30 a.m., and wow.

From the jacket blurb: "Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the 'Fun Home.' It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve."

Why did no one tell me about this book? I mean, I've been a fan of Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For since the late 80s, and I knew Fun Home had won awards and stuff. But this is the best book I've read in a long while, and I think pretty much everyone on my FL would love it. It's about family and love and death and sex and literature and truth and lies, it's funny and moving, and it packs quite a wallop in its deft, light way. Read this book, FL!!!

Bechdel side note: I have this very happy memory of reading Dykes to Watch Out For in Washington DC, circa 1989, when I was there for a gigantic pro-choice March on Washington. I wrote a poem about it at the time (when I was in my most rabidly ultrafeminist phase), and I looked it up last night. ( basically heterosexual girls engrossed in lesbian comics... )

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A cool link some of you may be interested in (I sure am): Africa Reading Challenge. "Participants commit to read - in the course of 2008 - six books that either were written by African writers, take place in Africa, or deal significantly with Africans and African issues."