Ruth's Review
Ruth Mountaingrove has been reviewing books (and sometimes other media) for the L-Word since 1993. We've put a few of our favorites here, if there are others you remember and would like to see email us at The L-Word and we'll try to get them up
- View from Another Closet, by Janet Bode, reviewed March 1997
- The Price of Salt by Clare Morgan, reviewed March 1998
- Weeding at Dawn: A Lesbian County Life, reviewed Janaury 2001
- In the Name of Friendship by Marilyn French, reviewed August 2006
- Sinister Wisdom on Death, Grief, and Surviving, reviewed September 2006
- Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence, reviewed October 2006
- Body of Crimson Leaves, reviewed November 2006
- We’Moon ’07: Gaia Rhythms for Womyn, reviewed December 2006
- Songs of the Goddess,CD, reviewed January 2007
View from Another Closet
View From Another Closet by Janet Bode, Hawthorn Books, Inc. New York 1976, 252 pgs hard bound $8.95When I was still living in Philadelphia I considered the idea as one with possibilities for me though I was still a heterosexual and had yet to have a sexual experience with a woman. Though I had been deeply in love with a friend of mine, a woman who was 20 years older than I was.
When I became a lesbian and a separatist I was not friendly toward bi-sexual women feeling that as women they could have all the emotional goodies from women and yet have all the patriarchal goodies that come from relating to men. I also felt then that? bi-sexual women would break your heart. In fact I knew a woman or two that had had her heart broken.
Lately having a few friends who do consider themselves bi- sexual I have had to look at my prejudices.
The book was published in 1976 but as with many things, not much has changed. Bi-sexual women feel misunderstood. Many of them are in the closet. They don't discuss their bi-sexuality with parents or only special friends. They feel that when they tell people, those people see the bi-sexual as hitting on them. Actually bi-sexuals pick a partner with the same care as a lesbian does.
They are looked at askance by both hets and les/gays and don't fit anywhere. This makes life difficult but tends to make a woman strong if she can survive the isolation.
Bode has interviewed 8 bi-sexual women in depth. They averaged 28 years of age in 1976 which means that they now would be in their 50's. AIDS is not mentioned because we were still ignorant of its existence.
The women contended that there are a lot more bi-sexuals out there than are willing to admit to it or who are willing to stand up and be counted. And this echoes the queer scene. None of the women knew each other. Some of them were married, most of them were not.
Bode's method, (this is a sociological study) was a six page questionnaire plus personal interview generally lasting several hours. Not deathless prose but if you are looking for information on how these women see their bi-sexuality, it's worth reading.
Bi-sexuality doesn't seem to have come much further than it did in 1976, Urvashi Vaid in Virtual Equality , published 1995, says, speaking about the gay community " We have not claimed,for example, the many millions of Americans who have nonexclusively engaged in gay or lesbian sexual behavior. In other words bi-sexual people may be far more numerous than either gay or straight people acknowledge. Yet neither camp will claim that constituency."
I wonder if the book brought Bode's group together, and what they are doing now twenty years later.
This review from the L-Word March or possibly April, 1997 Ruth Mountaingrove
The Price of Salt
The Price of Salt by Claire Morgan, Naiad Press, 1984, paperback, 276 pages, $7.95Some books can be influential in your life. The Price of Salt has been in mine. I first found the book in 1958 in a drugstore in Philadelphia. What made it unique was it had a happy ending. Very unusual in pulps which were mainly written by men. One of the protagonists was either drowned in a flood or committed suicide, or both. Someone had to die because being a lesbian was a sin.
So here was a book for a woman, myself, who had been, as they say, questioning her sexuality for ten years. Who was in love with her best friend 20 years older than herself. Here was a really well written novel about a young woman 19, questioning her identity and a lesbian woman of 36. Hmm.
This was not a good time to be a lesbian. I met my best friend in 1948 when I was 25 and she was 45 - really different life times. She seemed such a wise woman. As Carol, 36, seems to Therese, pronounced Terez, as she tells Carol. Therese is enchanted in the full meaning of the word. All life that has any meaning for her is in Carol, as Therse's boy friend gradually realizes.
Carol and Therese meet at a New York City department store during the frantic last days before Christmas. Therese is working to earn some money to see her through the next couple of months while she designs stage sets for plays in the Village. Carol is there to buy a doll for her five year old daughter.
The book was first published in 1952 and seems to be set in the late forties. I have read it in hard cover and in paperback and read it last, a couple of months ago, in the 1984 reissue by Naiad Press.
Some of my dating of the novel comes from the crude listening devices of the private detective who follows them when they take a trip across country. Carol loses her daughter, as lesbians did in that time, to her ex who she is divorcing.
Being a lesbian is still dangerous even though there is far more acceptance than there was then. Lesbians can still lose the children they have had in a het marriage. Lesbians still need to keep quiet about their sexual lives. I knew this and kept very quiet about my feelings for my 20 year old friend. Later, during the time my daughter was living with me as a minor, I kept quiet about my lover who was three years younger than me.
Like Carol I had fought a custody battle. Unlike her I had won. It was not fought on the basis of being a lesbian but because I was proposing to take my daughter 3000 miles away from Philadelphia to live in a commune in Oregon. This would inconvenience my ex who was used to seeing her whenever he wished and not seeing her when he didn't.
The judge gave my daughter, then nine, her choice of parents and she chose me. I cannot imagine that that choice would have been given her if it had been known I had a lesbian lover.
While I have said the book has a happy ending, nobody gets killed or maimed for life, the ending is realistic. The Price of Salt is one of those books, like Patience and Sarah, that is part of our herstory. Any lesbian worth her salt should read it.
review 3/98 Ruth Mountaingrove
Weeding at Dawn
Weeding At Dawn: Lesbian Country Life by Hawk Madrone, HaworthPress Inc., 10 Alice Street, Binghamton, N.Y. 2000, 195 pages, paperback $15.95
In the 1970's quite a few lesbian women moved from the city to the land in Southern Oregon. The land they could afford was up almost impossible logging roads with no access to water, unless trucked in, not electricity, no phone, no central heating, sometimes, no buildings.
Logged over, the land was in their price range. The roads would wash out with the winter storms and have to be restored. Trees would have to be sawed into proper lengths for burning in the only source of heat, the wood stove. Candles and kerosene lamps would be brought into the land to provide light after the sun went down, and springs would have to be found to provide water. How all this can come together is the background to Hawk Madrone's memoirs, Weeding at Dawn.
If you are thinking how romantic it would be to live on your own land and raise your food, this book will provide you with a healthy dose of reality. Yes, you can live in the country but, and it?s a big but, it is labor intensive, meaning doing so takes a lot of work. Nothing is simple.
The stove and staying warm - just as you begin to get cozy the fire needs more wood or you'll be sitting in the cold or having to start a new fire. Before you can make the fire you need to build up a wood pile to supply you with fuel. Dry seasoned wood. Green wood smokes and smolders and refuses to warm you.
As to food and growing your own, you will have to learn gardening. You will have to nourish the land with manure. You will need a truck to bring in supplies.
Most important, you will need a partner or more than one. At one time there were four lesbians loving and living at Fly Away Home. There were women who came to stay, sometimes for two years, and then moved on but Hawk and Bethroot stayed with the land finishing one of the buildings already on the land for Hawk, and then finally building a decadon house for Bethroot. They both have lived there for twenty-five years.
Hawk shares with us the lessons she has learned not just from raising chickens and vegetables but also about relationships. And lessons from her animal friends, the dogs and cats that live with her at Fly Away Home. She has dedicated the book to twelve of these friends who have shared her life. She shares with us her loses as these friends, whose life spans are so much shorter than ours, leave her life.
Hawk lives on woman-only land. When she fell in love with a woman who had a son, it meant that even though she felt the woman was her life mate, her conviction that the land was exclusively for women, lost her her lover.
Living at Fly Away Home, has brought Hawk joy and sorrow, as life does to all of us. You will live some of that life with her as you look at her photographs, read her poems and stories in Weeding at Dawn.
review 1/01 Ruth Mountaingrove
In the Name of Friendship
In The Name of Friendship by Marilyn French, Feminist Press, 2005, 382 pages, hard bound, $24.95Depending on your age and your involvement in feminism in the seventies this may not have much interest for you. Marilyn French gives you the herstory of that time through four characters: Maddy, who is seventy-six; Alicia, fifty; Jenny, thirty; Emily, seventy. The time is 2000.
These four friends support each other, give each other advice, and look back at the seventies when women were waking up to the idea that they too could have a life.
Jenny is an artist married to a successful artist. Maddy is a crackerjack real estate sales person married to a retired lawyer. Alicia, a Jew married to a Jewish psychiatrist, is an historian of the area she lives in. She has a gay son. Emily is a composer of classical music and is single.
French has some trenchant things to say about marriage and why it isn't working. Through her characters she gives us the herstory of the women's movement in the sixties beginning with Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique. The novel stretches from there into the eighties and nearly into present time.
Alicia is the daughter of an immigrant mother whose family was wiped out in a Nazi pogrom. The mother then thirteen had been sent ahead to the United States and never saw her family again. She marries, has a child. Her husband dies and she remarries her boss for security for her child and herself and money and ensures that Alicia will be sent to college.
All of these women live in Steventon, a mythical small town in the Berkshires and gradually through their friendship begin to find out who they really are and what they really want.
Emily and Maddy are natives of Steventon and have known each other since Emily was in First grade. Maddy has always looked after Emily, the dreamer, except when Emily's father sent her to Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and while she was in Rome studying, or teaching in Boston.
Emily came back to Steventon when she inherited an old Victorian mansion which had been in her family for generations. Maddy also lives in an old Victorian and when she was younger filled it with her children. Jenny lives in a modern house designed by her artist husband. Alicia also lives in a restored Victorian. Jenny and Alicia are outsiders but are welcomed into the circle by Maddy and Emily.
While all the women who are married stay married they have some rough patches to go through. Alicia's challenge is to get her psychiatrist husband to accept his gay son and his son's lover. Maddy's is to accept her damaged son, back from Vietnam. Jenny has to resolve a conflict in herself between the artist and the desire to be a mother. Emily's challenge is to accept her lesbian niece she had a hand in raising, and her niece's partner, a black doctor.
What French is saying is that men are still macho and competitive, having been brought up by their patriarchal society to be that way, just as women are still accepting second place. This is what is destroying marriage.
Some men do change: the psychiatrist accepts his gay son and son's lover even though it means that he will never have a grandson to carry on the tradition. The artist who made Jenny promise never to have a child, he has children by his former marriages, relents and even enjoys being a father.
Jenny has an exhibition of her paintings. So we can have a child and go on creating? Yes. Emily accepts that her work as a composer is just as good, if not superior to men.
This book is really a sequel to The Women's Room, her first novel. You might want to read that one too. That was published in 1977 and is still in print. In the Name of Friendship was first published in Holland three years ago. No US publisher wanted it. Having been published in Holland, Feminist Press could then publish it in the US.
French is noting that the ferment has gone out of feminism and speculates that what might get women out on the streets would be the Supreme Court outlawing abortion.
We are living in a different time. Women do have more opportunities than in the sixties but there is so much yet to be done. French is seventy-seven. Who will pick up the torch of feminism and carry it on for these pioneers?
Reviewed Aug 2006 Ruth Mountaingrove
Sinister Wisdom: Death, Grief, and Surviving
Death, Grief and Surviving. Guest Editors, Judith Witherow and Sue Lenaerts, Sinister Wisdom, Double issue #68,69, 2006. 256 pages, paperback $9 + $1.50 for shipping.Where to begin to deal with the subject of death? A subject even more taboo than sex or money. Top of the list of topics no one talks about. But here in Death, Grief and Surviving is a forum for lesbians where we can open up our wounds and through sharing feelings, emotions begin to heal this pain.
There are 230 entries. Some women have contributed more than one with an article and a poem, or an article and a photograph. Article is such a cold word for these writings. Sometimes it is the observer who writes how she feels and sometimes the writer is herself grieving loss of the life she used to know.
Teresa Campbell was diagnosed with MS when she was 34. Her story is a courageous one, as are so many in this book.
Tee Corinne, who herself has been diagnosed with cancer of the liver, celebrates her partner Beverly Brown's life, and death of colon cancer. Both women have survived longer than predicted. Bev wanted to be photographed with her colostomy bag so that others could see what that was like.
Judith Witherow mourns her younger sister's death and has some trenchant things to say about our broken health system. She is responsible, along with Sue Lenaerts for the double issue of Death, Grief and Surviving. It is a beautiful book made out of grieving by the survivors. Any lesbian grieving will be comforted.
Cynthia Rich mourns her long time partner Barbara Macdonald's death who before descent into Alzheimer?s, led OLOC (Old Lesbians Organizing for Change) in the fight against ageism.
Marjory Nelson tells of her friend Jean who contracted Guillian Barre Syndrome which left her paralyzed. This independent woman who had to have a circle of friends take care of her until she died.
Then there are the lesbians who contemplate suicide, even attempt it but survive. And lesbians who succeed and leave behind their partners, friends, relations to wonder what they might have done to prevent this death. There are lesbians who sons have committed suicide. I am one of them.
There are lesbians who watch their loved ones die of cancer: their mothers, their sisters, brothers, their lovers. There is so much pain in this book that I could only read a few pages at a time.
There are lesbians who grieve their pets. A goat that provided milk for baby lambs whose mothers died in birthing them. Dogs that had been faithful companions for many years.
Lesbians who grieve the loss of their childhood to sexual abuse.
Hawk Madrone has a tender story of her taking care of Beverly Brown called Butch Hug. Hawk insisting she is a whole woman, not butch or femme and Beverly agreeing but insisting that they were both butch, wanting that aspect of lesbians to be honored.
Jean Sirius in How It Was begins with "here's what I think: I think the reason we have hearts is so they can be broken. All the nice stuff, the limerance, the passion: it's all just bait. I think the breaking is what teaches us compassion, moves us along the path to becoming fully human".
And Judy Freespirit in Some Thoughts In Not Dying comes back from death's door to dictate her experience to her circle of friends, to get good health care, to begin to live again.
There are some beautiful poems, drawings, photographs. And as I read the book I kept going back to the contributors to learn more about them. Ask your local bookstore to order it for you.
Reviewed 9/06 Ruth Mountaingrove
Lesbian Nuns
Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence edited by Rosemary Curb and Nancy Manaham, Naiad Press, 1985. 383 pages, paperback $9.95Reading Lesbian Nuns for the second time I was struck by the age when these women made their decision to become nuns - late adolescence. How often they were Catholics and had been taught by nuns. Nuns who served as role models for these young girls, many of whom were latent lesbians.
Brought into an all women's space they discovered particular friendships frowned upon by the church. That love was for all sisters and primarily for Jesus and God. This conflict within the young women was sometimes resolved by leaving the convent, or being told to leave, or being moved to another convent many states away.
For Catholic women in the 1950's there were two options: marriage or becoming a nun. Women who came from poor blue collar working class families had little hope of going to college no matter how intelligent they were.
The nuns and the convents made this possible. Women were sent to college to be trained as teachers. Some of them went on to Masters degrees and even doctorates.
For some the convents were safe havens from the world. The rules protected them, provided useful work, spiritual food, recreation. For girls coming from poor families they found the convents luxurious, the food far better than they had ever known. For others the Rule and rules were prison bars.
Young women were "called" to be nuns. Some were in love with the music, some with the ritual. Those who entered in the 1960's like Jeanne Cordova were caught in the Catholic churches attempt to bring itself into the 20th century. Latin was being changed to English and folk songs were being substituted for ceremony. Cordova, who was there for the ritual, was disgusted. Habits were out, street clothes were in. Coming from a family of eleven, she and one of her brothers were the only ones to become gay. It was here in the convent she discovered her sexuality. Cordova only lasted a year in this disappointing environment leaving to found and publish Lesbian Tide 1971 - 1980.
Nuns have been in the mother house in very responsible positions, the equivalent of CEO administrators of thousands of women, or in charge of finances. They have been nuns for many years.
What the Catholic church has not been able to do except in a cruel way is accept particular friendships as a normal part of the convent world, leaving some women with a load of guilt. This rule is patriarchal, given by the male side of the church and then left to the nuns to enforce. Women loving women create a tremendous energy that the convents might do well to incorporate rather than repress.
Lesbian Nuns contains 52 articles by nuns who either accommodated to the convent rules and learned to live with them or left the convent. If you are leaning in the direction of becoming a nun this would be a good book to read. You can probably find it in a secondhand bookstore.
Ruth Mountaingrove oct 06
Body of Crimson Leaves
Body of Crimson Leaves by Celia Homesly, The Backwater Press,2006, 74 pages, paperback, $14
In Body of Crimson Leaves, Celia Homesly takes us into her way of seeing. Her connection with nature, with flowers, with her young self.
She told me in an interview on Through the Eyes of Women that her poetry did not fit the current trends of the poets at San Francisco State where she earned her MFA in Creative Writing. Yet words are central to what Celia writes. Each word seems to be carefully chosen for just this mood, this color, this poem.
Celia and I were in Judith Minty’s poetry class at Humboldt State University and that is how we know each other. She earned a BA in English and Journalism. This is her first poetry book but certainly not her last.
Celia told me that she sent out poetry for ten years accumulating rejection slips and acceptances. Nine poetry magazines are listed where she has been published. In that time Celia developed her own voice.
Here is one of her poems from the book.
Mother of the Dead
The river lies still,
nerves rotted.
I traveled for years
beneath the mountain
of flowers that
shatter like glass.
It carried the shards
like a mother carries children,
around and
around the earth.
There is darkness in these poems as well as light. There is mystery, magic. In Nurturing Night she says:
I am alone when she dies.
I light candles.
Wind from the fields flows in.
In darkness,
sounds are brilliant and distant.
Stars are speaking to each other
over the quiet life of grass
Which is a quiet acceptance of what is: death and aloness. Many of these poems are much longer but I am restricted by space. Here are two from a long poem The Garden Where Girls Grow.
Daisy
(the small girls took turns
tearing off her petals behind
the thick oak.)
Innocents destroying beauty not knowing what they are doing. Her petals put the reader in the place of the daisy and we can feel the tearing the daisy feels.
Dahlia
Old star, snail-bitten, I hold your crown
to my cheek beneath a crescent moon
and no one is watching.
You should be able to find Body of Crimson Leaves at Northtown Books or you can ask them to order it for you.
Ruth Mountaingrove nov '06
We’Moon ’07
We’Moon ’07: Gaia Rhythms for Womyn. On Purpose. Mother Tongue Ink, 2006. 233 pages $17.95
To begin with we almost lost We’Moon. The womyn working in this cottage industry collective had an implosion and when the dust cleared there was only a skeleton crew of 4 remaining. Musawa, who has been the main-stay as wemoonager decided to let the Goddess decide the fate of ’07. Evidently the Goddess said yes On Purpose ‘07 was to be produced. We hold it in our hands.
You can use the We’Moon ’07 as a datebook, or you can use it to learn astrology some astronomy or for celebrations of the seasons, and of course your sign’s predictions for the year 2007.
On Purpose ‘07 is another beautiful book made so by the gorgeous illustrations on every color-filled page. It has wise prose and thoughtful poetry. One of the contributors with two paintings is Lucy Calhoun of Arcata, CA. One of her paintings is in the Wall Calendar too.
This is the year of the Pig or Boar as some Chinese place mats tell you. A year of excess - eat, drink and be merry. “A time of fun and self-indulgence.” So enjoy. The year of the Rat that follows will be time enough to face reality. According to ’07, people born under the sign of the Pig are kind and honest, peaceful in nature and dislike conflicts and arguments. I was born in 1923, one of the Pig/Boar years. There are more nice things to say about Pigs and you can read them on page 29.
Why the theme On Purpose? Bethroot Gwynn and Musawa say “When we select the theme for We’Moon each year we read the pulse of our life-affirming womyn’s culture to divine the vital currents.” “What lessons and imperatives call to us in our personal and planetary work?” The theme was inspired by the Tarot card - The Chariot. The Goddess in the driver’s seat in charge of two horses with opposite aims, under her control. “There are risks to be entertained, leaps of faith to dare, journeys to learn from.”
So how has this affected We’Moon after the healing crisis? We’Moon Land now has a lovely new office. And in addition has a Southern Oregon branch known as We’Moon South, spreading the work over more women and land. The new business managers for We’Moon South are Tina and Barb. Organizations either grow or they die. Fortunately for us We’Moon has grown. See page 191
On Purpose ‘07 is proud to be a signatory to TREEty, a partnership between New Leaf Paper and the Breast Cancer Fund. Also a part of this We’Moon’s proceeds are set aside for womyns scholarships to EAT: Earth Activists Training. For more information on EAT visit www.earthactivists.org
There is also a Wall Calendar, $13.95 to inspire you for the next twelve months. I hang mine next to my front door. I love the large blocks where I can write in my dates. It’s how I keep track of my social life. My friends can enjoy the large paintings and see where the moon is in all its phases. As usual there is a lot of the We’Moon datebook material in the Wall Calendar. I note that my eighty-fourth birthday will be on a Wednesday in 2007. One of the many reasons to buy the datebook is that you get a more thorough horoscope for your sign. In the Wall Calendar you get a tantalizing taste.
According to the Wall Calendar, 2007 begins six years of astrological patterns that will change the course of modern history. This is known as The Great Turning. Sun flares will pick up speed over the next four years. This is our opportunity to partner with Nature to right the world.
Beautiful cards are again available with some of We’Moon ’07 paintings as well as cards from other years $10 or $5.95 if purchased with the datebook, wall calendar and new this year, a poster Matriotism. $20. All of this just in time for the Solstice gift giving.
Ruth Mountaingrove 12/06
Songs of the Goddess
Songs of the Goddess, CD, Cindee Grace and Band. 1983. Denver, Colorado. re-released in 2006. .and Wild Again, a shamanic sometimes comic journey of the Heart, CD, 2000. $15 includes tax and shipping.
Well to begin with Cindee Grace has a gorgeous singing voice as many of you will know who have heard her sing at Gay Pride fund raisers. She uses it as an instrument completely under her control. As a singer I can admire that..
While both CDs can be played on a CD player, if you want to follow the lyrics, or sing along, you can put the CD in your computer and open it in Word and print out the lyrics. Or if you don’t have a computer, Cindee will send you a print out. A very nice feature of these CDs.
Songs of the Goddess came to her from the Creator herself, all in a very short time as such creations do. She says “The dictation was ten songs complete with lyrics, melody, chords and arrangement.”
That’s how divine creation works. You open yourself and became the instrument for the Goddess. Of course prior to this you also would have training of the craft in which you create in. Songs of the Goddess are these songs.
It’s a little like the virgins and the oil for the lamps, you need to be prepared, as Cindee was. She says she was a vocal performance major at UCLA. She tells this in a speech she made before the local Humboldt Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, Later at another college she earned a BA in Psychology. At present she is a traditional naturapath practitioner.
These learned skills are the result of her own experiences. Her need to understand what she had suffered in her own family, abuse physical, emotional and sexual from a father who was an active alcoholic.
At fifteen a doctor told her she had only a year to live. She was determined to survive and has.
She shared the Songs of the Goddess with many well known feminists: Merlin Stone who used the song Aphrodite in her series The Return of the Goddess. Cindee also shared her work with Kay Gardner, Z Budapest, Ann Forfreedom, Hallie Iglehart Austen who said that when she was down the songs brought her back up from her sadness.
Cindee is a versatile musician playing guitar, piano, keyboard orchestration, prayer drum, rattle, jingle sticks, bass Ghana talking drum, multi-guiro, African Shekere, ocarina, All these in Wild Again. Vocals with back up from Susan, Emily, Claire and occasionally the audience in a drone or a sing along.
While it is nice to have the lyrics, they come alive with the music, the singing, the timpani. In the Songs of the Goddess Cindee encourages us to make copies but make a donation, In Wild Again she asks us not to copy because she needs the money to pay for the next CD she is currently making. If you recall Cindee was looking for singers to be part of this next CD.
Cindee sings Make Earth Your Home. Yes, it’s our only home and we need to take care of it. Global warming is real. Severe storms such as have just visited Seattle, the one that visited us here on the coast last January, Katrina, droughts, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis - there is no way to escape - we live here - on this little round planet perfect for our survival if we don’t destroy ourselves.
You can contact Cindee Grace at Cindee Grace, P. O. Box 6865, Eureka, CA, 95502 or at cindeegrace@sbcglobal.net
Ruth Mountaingrove Jan 07