The Editor, Fran Day, deserves a round of applause and all her supporters, as well, for 28 years of publication.
Sinister
Wisdom Journal: Celebrating 28 years! Sinister Wisdom #64: Lesbians and Music, Drama and Art
Available at SW, POB 3252, Berkeley, CA 94703. 128 pages, paperback $6 + $1.50 postage. More info at www.sinisterwisdom.org
Review written by Ruth Mountaingrove (reprinted with permission from The -L- Word Newsletter [June 2005])
This issue of Sinister Wisdom is a feast. How many of these lesbians have you heard of or know their work? Singer-songwriters Ferron, Chris Williamson, Jamie Anderson, Alix Dobkin? They are all in this issue. How about Mary Watkins? There is an interview with her by Sandy Tate. How about artists Tee Corrine, Sudie Rakusin, Lenore Chinn, photographers Hawk Madrone and Jean Weisinger?
Have you heard of Happy/L.A. Hyder? She founded LVA, Lesbians in the Visual Arts in San Francisco in 1990. You can visit LVA at www.lesbianarts.org. How about Kristan Aspen and her partner Janna MacAuslan and their duo Musica Femina Flute Guitar? Kristan and her partner live in Portland, Oregon and a few years ago came down to Arcata to do a house concert. Her article is on the herstory of the lesbian music of the Northwest. She begins in the year 1970 with an overview of lesbian music.
Ann Hackler writes about the Institute for Musical Arts (IMA) More at www.ima.org. She founded IMA and is the executive director.
Then there is theatre. Carolyn Gage has a one act play, The Drum Lesson which a drumming circle might like to perform. Gage is the author of the play Joan of Arc and forty-eight other plays, musicals and one woman shows, as well as four books on lesbian theatre.
Have you heard of Bethroot Gwynn? Well that depends on whether you were here in Arcata when she performed her one woman show Immaculate Decision, about abortion, at Humboldt State University. She has a new one I would like to see - Women; the Longest Revolution, A Performance Documentary (2003 - 2004)
There are some coming out stories. Tangren Alexander's article is called How Lesbian Music Changed My Life and Lesbian Art Sustained It. Lesbians can attest to that.
Many of these women are multi-talented. Hawk Madrone who took the photograph of Bethroot in performance is also the author of the book Weeding at Dawn. She is land partners with Bethroot and they own Fly-a-Way Home where Bethroot directs Personal Theatre. Tee Corrine is not only an artist but also a photographer of famous lesbian writers and a poet, novelist, and non-fiction recorder and preserver of lesbian herstory in southern Oregon.
Laura Aguilar, a Latina and a lesbian writes about her and other Latinas" invisibility in the Los Angeles gay and lesbian community. She is a photographer and has two photographs in this issue of Sinister Wisdom. One is set in the forest and the other at the beach, These are part of an on going project of self-portraits.
Kathleen Allen writes movingly from her prison cell about her life as a poet and writer and why she destroyed all that work. Music from her harmonica has eased the tensions of her prison life for her. Ruth Mountaingrove writes about Lesbian and Art, about the women's movement and her art in the late sixties, the seventies, the early eighties, first in Philadelphia and then in Oregon and lastly in California.
There are more lesbians creating art and I am pleased to be part of this book. Fran Day, the editor, has done herself proud bringing together so many talented women.