Sinister Wisdom 116: Making Connections

By Sinister Wisdom

Sinister Wisdom 116: Making Connections is the fifth issue of Sinister Wisdom's series of work edited by the Southern Lesbian Feminist Activist Herstory Project, documenting the vital lesbian-feminist activism that proliferated in the US South during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Making Connections details the extensive networking of lesbian booksellers, publishers, writing groups, and newsletter through engaging interviews, first person narratives, and innovative graphic timelines. All of this was researched & written by the Southern Lesbian Feminist Activist Herstory Project Making Connections features herstory about: Women in Print Movement, The Feminist Newsletter, Kansas City Womyns' News, Bluestocking Books, Whole Women Press, Womonwrites, Naiad Press, Rubyfruit Books, Newsletter publications in the South, and Feminist Bookstores in the South.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sinister Wisdom
• Release date: Apr 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781944981594

Sinister Wisdom

Sinister Wisdom is a multicultural lesbian literary & art journal that publishes four issues each year. Publishing since 1976, Sinister Wisdom works to create a multicultural, multi-class lesbian space. Sinister Wisdom seeks to open, consider and advance the exploration of lesbian community issues. Sinister Wisdom recognizes the power of language to reflect our diverse experiences and to enhance our ability to develop critical judgment as lesbians evaluating our community and our world.

Book preview

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Publisher: Sinister Wisdom, Inc.

Editor: Julie R. Enszer

Guest Editors: Rose Norman, Merril Mushroom, Kate Ellison

Graphic Designer: Nieves Guerra

Copy Editor: Amy Hong

Board of Directors: Roberta Arnold, Tara Shea Burke, Cheryl Clarke, Julie R. Enszer, Sara Gregory, J.P. Howard, Joan Nestle, Rose Norman, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Yasmin Tambiah, and Red Washburn

Jaime Harker’s essay, The Women in Print Movement and the Southern Lesbian- Feminist Bookwomen, is from THE LESBIAN SOUTH: SOUTHERN FEMINISTS, THE WOMEN IN PRINT MOVEMENT, AND THE QUEER LITERARY CANON by Jaime Harker. Copyright © 2018 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. www.uncpress.org

Cover Art: Lines I Cannot Cross - Artist: Robin Toler

Media: Digital

Size of artwork: 8 x 12

Artist Biography: Robin Toler, ATR-BC, LAC, AIT-C, is a board certified art therapist, licensed addictions counselor, and certified in Advanced Integrative Therapy. Toler's practice and consulting services offer art therapy, addictions counseling, energy therapy, pain management and women’s mental health. Toler’s therapy practice is based on equity and human rights. Her private practice is in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Toler is an artist, writer and drummer.

Contact Toler at www.robintoler.com or www.robintolerartstudio.com.

Artist Statement: Lesbian activists crossed boundaries to break rules, stretch limits, and overcome restrictions and other lines structured by male institutions: sexual, moral, religious, political, financial, legal, and social. Paths, symbolized by the lines in the picture, illustrate the numerous challenges these women bravely pushed through while living within a hardened patriarchal world.

SINISTER WISDOM, founded 1976

Former editors and publishers:

Harriet Ellenberger (aka Desmoines) and Catherine Nicholson (1976–1981)

Michelle Cliff and Adrienne Rich (1981–1983)

Michaele Uccella (1983–1984)

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz (1983–1987)

Elana Dykewomon (1987–1994)

Caryatis Cardea (1991–1994)

Akiba Onada-Sikwoia (1995–1997)

Margo Mercedes Rivera-Weiss (1997–2000)

Fran Day (2004-2010)

Julie R. Enszer & Merry Gangemi (2010–2013)

Julie R. Enszer (2013–)

Copyright © 2019 Sinister Wisdom, Inc.

All rights revert to individual authors and artists upon publication.

Printed in the U. S. on recycled paper.

Subscribe online: www.SinisterWisdom.org

Join Sinister Wisdom on Facebook: www.Facebook.com/SinisterWisdom

Follow Sinister Wisdom on Instagram: www.Instagram.com/sinister_wisdom

Sinister Wisdom is a US non-profit organization; donations to support the work and distribution of Sinister Wisdom are welcome and appreciated. Consider including Sinister Wisdom in your will.

Sinister Wisdom, 2333 McIntosh Road, Dover, FL 33527-5980 USA

Table of Contents

Notes for a Magazine

Notes for a Special Issue

Gail Reeder

Hide and Seek

Suzanne Barbara

Bookstore Collage

Rose Norman

You had to be passionate and crazy: Feminist Booksellers in the South

Rose Norman & Jennifer Scott

Timeline of Feminist Bookstores in the South, 1970–1999

Merril Mushroom

Joan E. Denman’s Rubyfruit Books, Tallahassee

Teresa Williams

Bluestocking Books, Columbia, SC

Woody Blue from an interview with Faye Williams

Sisterspace and Books

Errol E.R Anderson

Blueprint for a Feminist Bookstore Future—A Personal History of Charis

Nancy Blood

Whole Women Press (1976–81)

Jaime Harker

The Women in Print Movement and the Southern Lesbian-Feminist Bookwomen

Rose Norman, Merril Mushroom, Kate Ellison

Womonwrites, Lesbian-Feminist Cultural Cauldron

Sheilah Grace Shook

Womonwrites

LauRose DancingFire Felicity

The Louisville League of Lesbian Writers

Woody Blue

Gainesville Lesbian Readers Potluck

Merril Mushroom

Knoxville Writers and the Beginning of Sinister Wisdom

Helen Renée Brawner

The Southern Women’s Poetry Workshop with Adrienne Rich at The Pagoda, St. Augustine, FL

Robin Toler

Why I Write

Linda Yates

The Group: A Memoir

Cat Purdom

Newsletter Collage

Rand Hall

Lesbian Publications of the South – Changing Lives

Marie Steinwachs

Networking

Rainbow (Sue Parker Williams)

Newsletters Were My Feminist Education

Nancy Blood, Leslie Kahn, Donna Giles, Sherry Kinlaw, Sherri Zann Rosenthal, Cynthie Kulstad, Patience Vanderbush, Dee Lutz

Triangle Area Newsletter Memories

Merril Mushroom

Feminary: A Feminist Journal for the South Emphasizing the Lesbian Vision

Barbara Esrig

Rosalie Miller, from an interview by Barbara Esrig WomaNews, Gainesville, FL, 1975-78

Marsha Strong, from an interview by Barbara Esrig Mama Raga, Gainesville, FL, 188-2014

B. Leaf Cronewrite

Kansas City Womyns’ News, 1988–89

Elizabeth W. Knowlton

ATALANTA, Atlanta, GA, 1973-1994

Barbara Stoll and Sage Morse

Womyn’s Words, St. Petersburg, FL, 1980–2013

Rand Hall

The Gazette, The Suncoast Gay & Lesbian News Magazine

Jennifer Scott

Preserving Herstory: An Exploration of the Grassroots Newsletters in the ALFA Periodical Collection

Rand Hall and Rose Norman

Newsletter Timeline

Lesbian-feminist Newsletters in Southern Cities

Jill Spisak

Sewing

Book Reviews

Snapshot Lesbian Love Celebration

Contributors

Notes for a Magazine

How do you find the lesbians? I found myself asking this question recently when we spent time in a small Michigan city and then relocated to the Tampa, Florida area. The question did not have immediate urgency to me; I was busy with work and unpacking and all of the usual challenges of moving, but it was on my mind. Where are the lesbians and how do I find them? Eventually, I found the lesbians first online through Facebook, listservs, and websites. As I think through my own life, I wonder, how did we find each other before all of this technology?

Sinister Wisdom 116: Making Connections begins to answer that questions, and one of the premier answer is books! Books, bookstores, writing groups, and other literary ventures were vital to connecting women with one another. The women of the Southern Lesbian Feminist Activist Herstory Project present their fifth (and nearing final) installment of work that documents the lives and actions of lesbians living in the south from the late 1960s through the 1990s. In this issue of Sinister Wisdom, readers will find rich stories of bookstores and publications that served as an important way women made connections. I am so pleased to present Sinister Wisdom 116: Making Connections to our readers.

Sinister Wisdom continues making these connections through our work at the journal. Thank you for reading these pages and thank you to everyone who contributed to the Sinister Wisdom year end fundraising campaign. As always, lesbians come out and support Sinister Wisdom to keep her publishing and doing the work of nurturing lesbian literature and culture out in the world. Thank you. I see you and appreciate you.

In addition to the gifts of support for the journal that make a difference and help us reach our year end fundraising goal, I want to highlight two other ways that women support Sinister Wisdom. First, we have a growing number of monthly sustainers who make a gift every single month to support Sinister Wisdom. As I write this in January 2020, there are forty sustainers to Sinister Wisdom. Forty women (and a few men!) make a monthly gift of support for the journal ranging from $3 a month to over $100 a month. This revenue is a vital source of support to keep the monthly operations running. In exchange for this monthly commitment, these sustainers receive a continuing subscription to the journal (no missed issues!) And as a special gift all additional publications of Sinister Wisdom (like our annual calendar and the blank book that we published last year). I also send these sustainers a monthly email which one sustainer described as these chummy sort of notes, very like what my Mother and Aunts (her sisters) wrote each other. These emails give an update on what is happening with Sinister Wisdom each month - a behind the scenes glimpse into the world of the journal as it operates from the purple casita over in central Florida. If you are interested in becoming a sustainer to Sinister Wisdom (I’d love too see our sustainers double in 2020), you can do so online at http://www.sinisterwisdom.org/sustainers.

On a daily basis, the monthly gifts of sustainers inspires me. Occasionally, a legacy gift from a Sinister Wisdom supporter delights me. Legacy gifts are gifts that people make as a part of their will or trust. Upon their death, remaining financial assets are distributed to people and nonprofit organizations. Sinister Wisdom has been the recipient of a few of these visionary gifts and it has an extraordinary impact on the organizations—keeping our work alive and building a small reserve to help us weather difficult financial times. It is not too strong to say that Sinister Wisdom is alive today because a few visionary women made significant gifts to help the organization survive and thrive. I thank them all—and I invite you to consider supporting the organization in this way.

Now on to the good words of this issue! And more to come for the balance of 2020!

In sisterhood,

Julie R. Enszer, PhD

Spring 2020

Notes for a Special Issue

Our twenty-first century users of social media, email, and cell phones have nothing on second- and third-wave lesbian-feminists when it comes to social networking. This fifth volume from the Southern Lesbian Feminist Activist Herstory Project collects stories of some of the ways that lesbians all over the South connected with each other for fun and activism through feminist bookstores and publishers, writing groups, newsletters, and newspapers.

Making Connections begins with stories of the feminist booksellers who nurtured the writing groups, distributed the newsletters, and always provided community space for lesbian culture. Now a vanishing breed, feminist bookstores once numbered over a hundred locations in the United States and Canada. Most of these booksellers were connected by the Feminist Bookstore Network and Feminist Bookstore News (FBN), both run by Carol Seajay in California. Rose Norman’s feminist bookseller story draws on interviews with twenty-one feminist booksellers in the South, as well as with Seajay and others knowledgeable about the feminist bookstore movement. We include separate stories about individual Southern bookstores no longer in business, as well as the story of the oldest surviving bookstore that still calls itself a feminist bookstore, Atlanta’s Charis Books & More. E.R. Anderson’s Blueprint for a Feminist Bookstore Future extends our chronology into the twenty-first century to describe how Charis has managed to survive and prosper. Only four of the forty-eight bookstores collected for our twentieth-century bookstore timeline remain in business: Charis Books and More in Atlanta, GA (recently moved to nearby Decatur, GA); BookWoman and Resistencia in Austin, TX; and Bag Lady in Charlotte, NC.¹ This issue also includes stories about feminist publishing. Nancy Blood writes about the Whole Women Press in North Carolina, and Jaime Harker writes about feminist publishers in the South and their connection to the Women in Print movement.

Our stories of lesbian-feminist writing groups begin with Womonwrites, the Southeast Lesbian Writers’ Conference, which has spawned writing groups around the South for forty years and gave birth to this Herstory Project. All of the writing group stories in this issue acknowledge a debt to Womonwrites, which in 2019 split into two new groups and retired the name.

Like feminist bookstores, printed feminist newspapers and newsletters proliferated all over the country during the last decades of the twentieth century before going online. Newsletters Were My Feminist Education writes Rainbow Williams from Florida. The Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (ALFA) collected those newsletters for over twenty years, swapping their local newsletter Atalanta in exchange for what would end up to be over 800 grassroots newsletters nationwide, spanning the years from 1962–94. Jennifer Scott reviews this unique collection now archived at Duke University, and Rand Hall brings us personal stories of some of those newsletters published in the Southeast, along with a timeline of over forty Southeastern publications, 1969–2011. This issue also features the fertile ground of the Triangle Area in North Carolina, with stories from and about some of the numerous women involved in print media there.

It is sad that so many feminist newsletters, bookstores, and publishers are gone, now relics of a generation remembered warmly by aging lesbians who were in many different ways at the forefront of lesbian-feminist activism for decades. These stories are a record of amazing acts of bravery, creativity, and hard work to express and share new lesbian thought. Today’s busy feminists are rooted in and informed by the work of that generation.

Fortunately, Charis, BookWoman, Resistencia Books, Bag Lady, and many lesbian writing groups continue, and some lesbian-feminist newsletters survive through various online options less costly than printing and mailing. The future of all of these is uncertain, as we face backlash and polarizing arguments that split even so small a group as lesbian-feminists. We take heart from collecting and reading these stories and from the endless ingenuity and forward thinking we find in the lesbian community. We hope you find our stories heartening, too. If you have a story inside you, please send it our way.

Rose Norman

Merril Mushroom

Kate Ellison

1 For logistical reasons, the Herstory Project has concentrated on eleven states in the Southeast, from Louisiana to Washington, DC. For this story we have included Texas because it was included in Rose Norman’s original research on feminist booksellers nationwide.

Hide and Seek

Gail Reeder

Cicadas vibrate at twilight to fireflies caught in mason jars.

Flickering lights released in the night, seeking and sparkling.

So we seek one another, each shining in our special way.

Fifth-grade fire drill, close in unlit hallways.

Cotton dresses, bare legs almost touching,

Leg hairs waving with electricity,

Tingling in hidden places.

Whispering to doodle bugs in the shadows under the porch,

Sharing warm breath and secrets.

Waiting for birds at sunrise in the wet grass.

Embracing, beneath a canopy of shooting stars.

The darkness is our friend.

Quilting women gather, a dinner table of fabric between them.

Silent in the closeness, making comfort while comforting.

We would have joined them, but we are not welcome here.

Their needles flash in the light.

The South has not been kind to us.

We have nudged politely for our place.

For we were raised with manners.

Saying yes m’am and thank you.

And kindness: a bless her heart to the special ones less able.

These values came into the struggle with us.

For where do we go when our churches and families turn us away?

We flee to baseball for hidden fun under the bleachers,

To political campaigns desperate for change.

We meet in writers’ circles, witches’ circles, feminists’ circles.

We are a well-rounded group of refugees.

Potluck suppers recall family reunions under the pecan trees.

We recreate the familial closeness with our own clubs and gatherings.

In celebrations we share the love that is ours,

And hope, for a brighter future,

Where darkness is no longer a necessity.

Bookstore Collage

Suzanne Barbara

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You had to be passionate and crazy: Feminist Booksellers in the South

Rose Norman

When Teresa Williams thinks about the bookstore she