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Write WingJuly 21, 2009 Enough already. I've been writing lots, just not here. And trying to get some riding in. If most of June was like early April, cool and very wet, the first half of July was like September, crisp and glorious. Sitting at the computer when I could be elsewhere seemed like a crime against my body. The good news is that Trivia has accepted my big sourdough essay for its "Are Lesbians Going Extinct?" issue -- not only accepted it, but accepted it like they think it matters. Its title is now "Lesbians Aren't Extinct, but Are We Still Fermentatious?" The edits requested were minimal; the major one was "fix the ending!" but I already knew that. Having not looked at the piece for a few weeks, I saw a way to strengthen it: by moving a paragraph up a bit, where it miraculously, with no tweaking whatsoever, turned into the culmination I hadn't been able to write before. A stonemason must feel similar satisfaction when she fills a troubling gap in the wall with a rock that's been in her pile all along. Trivia: Voices of Feminism is on the Web these days, and the issue goes up in early fall. Other ongoing writing projects are a review of On Joanna Russ, a collection of academic essays on Russ's work edited by Farah Mendlesohn, and the third in my sourdough triptych, "Why we need an independent feminist movement." On Joanna Russ is good, though not light reading, but the best thing about the assignment is that it's got me reading Joanna again. Turns out her 1997 book What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism is an invaluable touchstone for my "independent feminist movement" essay. I finally replaced two Russ nonfiction titles that had long since gone missing from my shelves: Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts and How to Suppress Women's Writing. A new chapters into the latter, it dawned on me that the same techniques worked well to suppress other kinds of writing (I already knew this) and they might actually be at work in the near-total silence with which island bookstores and newspapers have greeted Mud of the Place. That hadn't occurred to me before, but now that I've walked around the idea a few times I think I'm on to something. More about that at a later date. Inspired by the rumors (very recently confirmed) that President Obama and family were planning to vacation on Martha's Vineyard this summer, I wrote a pretty good open letter to the president about why he should forget about August and come in the off-season. I submitted a 1,300-word version to the Washington Post Outlook section, and when I heard nothing from them, I pared it down to a 875-word version and submitted it, in sequence, to the Boston Globe, the Cape Cod Times, and Salon.com. Having heard nothing from any of them either, I just sent it to the Vineyard Gazette. Doesn't anyone bother to acknowledge even the receipt of submissions any more? A couple of weeks ago, I sent it to the White House, along with a copy of Mud of the Place. It'll probably get deep-sixed and maybe even shredded, but I think it's rude to be sending open letters all over the place without making an attempt to get it to the intended recipient. I'm a little surprised that it hasn't been picked up yet. It's well written, close to op-ed length, and timely. My best guess is that the various editors don't even read anything unless they recognize the name of the writer, and my second-best guess is that maybe they actually read it but they just can't imagine that year-round Martha's Vineyard has a point of view worth discussing, possibly because they have a house here or their friends do or maybe (in the case of the Cape Cod Times) they don't want to rile the tourists and summer people by giving them the idea that "the locals" are actually sentient beings who don't live only to serve. Who knows? What I'm fighting for is the opportunity to kick some of these people in the complacency.
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