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Dark of the MoonDecember 29, 2005
Three calls for writing have -- what? reached me, grabbed me, blipped my radar, come to my attention in the last few weeks. A friend forwarded one via e-mail: an open anthology tentatively titled Homelands: Women's Journeys toward Meanings of Home. Another I clipped from the M.V. Times: a Cape Cod theater group is looking for short short (10 minutes/10 pages) plays. The third, appropriately enough, is from Trivia: Voices of Feminism, an indispensable journal of innovative feminist thinking whose print version died in 1993 and which has been reborn on the Web. An upcoming issue will focus on the lives and work of feminist thinkers and activists who have died. I've known for a long time that I had to write about Gloria Anzaldúa, the Chicana lesbian feminist whose exploration of the borderlands/la frontera I embraced for sanity and survival's sake, without which I wouldn't still be struggling to improvise answers to the mystifying question, "What's a lesbian feminist writer like you doing on Martha's Vineyard?" Anzaldúa died, at the age of only 61, in 2004. The time seems to have come. Homelands and borderlands are inextricably linked in my thinking and writing. Already the two calls are bouncing off each other, twining and arguing and making me anxious: can I pull this off or not? (Honey, I finished a damn NOVEL; I can do anything!) Periodically I itch to write for the theater again, but each time a dose of reality -- there's no grassroots theater scene on Martha's Vineyard -- makes the itch go away. Now an audience has presented itself, and a challenge: what can I do in 10 pages or less?
"Dark of the Moon" is by Karen Beth; I've been listening to it on Libana's most recent CD, Out of This World. I got to sing it along with about 60 other women at a workshop I went to almost five years ago, led by Libana's Susan Robbins and Marytha Paffrath. That's another thing. I want to be singing this music more often, not just listening to it. "Gloria in excelsis Deo" doesn't inspire me; "Gloria in excelsis Gloria" -- well, that's a new beginning! More about Libana, an ensemble that sings, dances, and otherwise performs women's world music, at http://www.libana.com. The music is inspiring, and so is the fact that they've been doing it for more than 25 years. If they perform or offer a workshop anywhere near you, go! Their recordings and lots of other good stuff can be had from Ladyslipper, at www.ladyslipper.org. Trivia: Voices of Feminism is at www.triviavoices.net.
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