Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival

By Sinister Wisdom

Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival honors the forty-year legacy of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (1976–2015). Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival celebrates this embodiment of radical feminist separatist collaboration, transformational self-defined autonomous spaces, a commitment to sisterhood and matriarchal culture, and a musical city sprung from the earth for one week in the woods.
A collective of five womyn each with a deep connection to Fest operated by consensus to create this issue. Striving to represent a range of womyn’s voices, values, traditions, and experiences of Fest, the collective highlighted what Fest has meant to generations of womyn, documented its chronology, and bore witness to the power of this community. Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival includes womyn from multiple races, geographies, sexualities, generations, and gender and other social identities. Just as Fest brought together womyn from various backgrounds, our collection includes a range of artistic experience, from seasoned authors and photographers to those womyn new to publishing.
Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival remembers the transformations, possibilities, and hopes for spaces cultivating the ongoing empowerment of womyn.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sinister Wisdom
• Release date: Aug 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9781944981662

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.

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Table of Contents

Notes for a Magazine

Notes for a Special Issue

Allison L. Ricket

The Growth of the Land: A Herstory in Pieces

Bonnie J. Morris

Thereland

Jean Wimberly

Oral History with Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz

Lola Lai Jong

A Womyn of Color Tent Story

Lin Daniels

Cosmetikos in Two Suitcases

Prairie

Mindfulness: Raising the Night Stage in 2002

Boden Sandstrom

Two Magical Moments at the Twentieth Anniversary of the

Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival

Yaniyah Pathfinder Pearson

Original Flow: Dance with Shadow Spirit

Tari Muñiz

The Last Line

Maria Catherino

Path to Michigan

Katherine Ayres

Trust Women

Jamie Anderson

My Summer Vacation

Tara Shannon

Oral History with Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz

Beth Burnett

Your Scars

Dawn Richberg

Selecting a Reader, Take 2

Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz

Stilt Walking in Hesperia (From Rice Pot Stories)

Manju Manissa

Love and Loss

Red Washburn

156 Avenue and Madison Road

Nedra Johnson

I Value Separate Spaces

Dream

One Day

Lee Evans

From Radical Listening to Holding Space: Building Community Amidst Conflict with the Allies in Understanding Workshops

Storme Webber

Metamorphosis

Sara St. Martin Lynne

A Song that Is Never Unsung

Smash

On Michfest Nudity

Catherine Crouch

Three Days in August 2001

Jennifer Lucia Oliveri

Truth in Fragments

Vanessa Mártir

An Education on Love Between Womyn

Jean Taylor

G’day, Michigan

Diana Rivers

The Reluctant Singer

Eleanor Leigh

The Butch Strut: A Femme’s Perspective

Robin A. níCathaín

Butch Tears

Ann Cvetkovich

Gal’s Salon

Moe Angelos

At the Mitten’s Edge

Edie Feather Daly

Memories of Michfest Forty

Gretchen Phillips

Safe Space . . . for Your Shit to Come Up

Marian Rae Carling

The Mother Tree

Karen Thompson

We Are All Shape-shifters Now

August Nights: Inspiring Quotations from our Sisters

Book Reviews

Contributors

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Notes for a Magazine

The editorial collective for Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival submitted the final manuscript to me on August 1, 2016, the exact day when the forty-first Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival would have been opening had it not ended with the fortieth festival in August 2015. While this issue of Sinister Wisdom is celebratory, there is some bitterness in it as well as we witness and note the end of one particular era of our lives, of our lesbian communities, and of our lesbian world.

In Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, Allison L. Ricket, Amy Washburn, Angela Martin, Brynn Warriner, and Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz gathered voices, images, and stories that celebrate the creation and sustainment of the Festival and also mark one of its endings. When I first received the manuscript from the intrepid collective, I emailed these brief sentences:

Wow. Just wow. I read the full manuscript this morning and laughed and cried and just loved every single word in it. Thank you all so much for your labor and love in this issue. In many ways, I feel like this issue may be the reason Sinister Wisdom had to stay alive and keep publishing for all of these years: to witness the life and times of the institution of the Festival. I feel honored to publish this issue.

A few months later, writing these notes, I feel the same way.

I am awed by this issue of Sinister Wisdom and enchanted by the experience of reading and holding the issue. I am impressed profoundly by the collective, Allison, Amy, Angela, Brynn, and Shawn, and their commitment to a collective process to edit the issue. I thank them for their time, their editorial expertise, and their passion for the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and for Sinister Wisdom. This issue, in addition to honoring the Festival, honors each of them. I am thrilled to have Sinister Wisdom mark the legacy of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.

Like all issues of Sinister Wisdom, there were many more submissions than the editorial collective could accept. For me, one of feminism’s fiercest commitments is to egalitarianism and transparency so I wanted to give readers a brief sketch of the volume of submissions for this issue. Our extraordinary collective of editors received a total of 213 submissions. Submissions included two oral histories, four pieces of fiction, fifty-one pieces of non-fiction, forty-seven poetry submissions, and one hundred eight images. Interest in this issue was clearly strong, which is why this issue is larger than our usual issues. I know from experience as a writer and editor that carefully curated issues capture people’s attention and imagination and also help us to manage the size and cost of individual issues. The editorial collective dove into the difficult task of selecting work for this issue. The collective accepted sixty-five individual pieces. The selected work represents a little less than a third of the total submissions, which is about the average for Sinister Wisdom acceptances; for general issues, I usually accept between thirty-three and forty percent of the work submitted. The excellent choices of the Editorial Collective are what you have in your hands. All of us at Sinister Wisdom are writers and editors and know how difficult it is to not have one’s work accepted for publication—and how important persistence is. And persist we do! Forty-one years now for Sinister Wisdom! This issue is not the final word on the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. Our submissions demonstrate that there are many more voices to speak and hear on the Festival. It will continue to inspire lesbian imagination and lesbian creativity for years to come.

I hope as you settle into reading Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival one January evening, you find as much delight and awe in the work as I did when I first read it on a warm summer day. For me, the legacy of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival is a call to our creative, lesbian selves. The ferns of Michigan whisper: create something that celebrates lesbians. Create it. Nurture it. Sustain it. Celebrate it. In the absence of a yearly gathering, I have come to believe that all of our creative work on behalf of lesbians affirms: I see the August in you.

Julie R. Enszer, PhD January 2017

Notes for a Special Issue

This special issue of Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michi- gan Womyn’s Music Festival honors the forty-year legacy of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (1976–2015). Sinister Wisdom 103 celebrates this embodiment of radical feminist separatist collaboration, transformational self-defined autonomous spaces, a commitment to sisterhood and matriarchal culture, and a musical city sprung from the earth for one week in the woods.

A collective of five womyn each with a deep connection to Fest operated by consensus to create this issue. We came to this project with enthusiasm and determination, excited to hear our sisters’ voices and document them in this herstorical issue for womyn. When Julie R. Enszer, the general editor of Sinister Wisdom, suggested this issue, we agreed that given the journal’s own existence for forty years as a bastion of lesbian feminist culture, such an issue was a perfect medium for commemorating Fest.

Through every stage, we sought to preserve the ethos of Fest. Bringing to bear the lessons we learned there, we shared every task, read and discussed every submission, collaboratively wrote each communication, and combined our unique strengths, organically establishing collective decision-making. Our radical politics guided the entire process through all of its challenges and its rewards. We committed to resolve our disagreements by holding each other accountable and keeping the principles of kindness and respect at the fore.

Striving to represent a range of womyn’s voices, values, traditions, and experiences of Fest, we highlighted what Fest has meant to generations of womyn, documented its chronology, and bore witness to the power of this community. We included poetry, fiction, herstory, photographs, oral histories, personal narratives, and prose by performers, festivalgoers, workshop facilitators, and workers. The issue includes womyn from multiple races, geographies, sexualities, generations, and gender and other social identities. Just as Fest brought together womyn from various backgrounds, our collection includes a range of artistic experience, from seasoned authors and photographers to those womyn new to publishing.

The generous outpouring of memories and stories overwhel-med us, especially during our community’s collective mourning. Julie R. Enszer echoed this generosity in her flexibility, stretching the issue to accommodate our desire for the maximum amount of space. Still, we could not include everything. Our greatest regret was that we were unable to capture each voice, each year, each song, each painting, each tent, each womon, each girl, each smile, each kiss.

We chose to focus on the celebration of Fest—rather than any one controversy—filling the collection with the joy and healing that Fest signified for so many womyn. This collection remembers the transformations, possibilities, and hopes for spaces cultivating the ongoing empowerment of womyn.

The editorial collective is grateful for the excitement that fed our energy and sparked important conversations that informed how we conceptualized and shaped this issue. This project would not have been possible without the womyn who had the courage to submit; whether or not your work was featured, it was integral to the forming of this special edition. Thank you to every womon who offered her support, assistance, and encouragement. Each of us in the editorial collective is grateful to her coeditors and their individual, untiring efforts to bring this project to fruition. We offer a most heartfelt thank-you to Julie R. Enszer for devoting an entire issue to honoring the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival; not only did she suggest the issue, but she also gave us the freedom to use our vision in (wo)manifesting this work commemorating the Festival that has meant so much to all of us. Lastly, we would like to thank Lisa Vogel and the many womyn, especially the dykes, who risked their safety to build Fest over forty years.

The Editorial Collective: Allison L. Ricket, Amy Washburn, Angela Martin, Brynn Warriner, and Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz

Winter 2017

The Growth of the Land: A Herstory in Pieces

Allison L. Ricket

The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (known as MWMF, Michfest, Fest, the Land, or simply Michigan) developed into a thriving city in the woods as a manifestation of the collective vision and will of thousands of womyn who passed through her gates each August for forty years. Integral to raising this city was an organic, collective process that evolved each year. Each year womyn saw needs, ways to improve their city, amenities needed to aid the city’s inhabitants, and they rose to collectively fill those needs. The city was a body unto herself, with each cell, each individual womon adding symbiotically to the health of the organism. For this reason, the herstory of Michfest lives in every worker, Festie, and matriarch who ever attended.

Our collective memory is not clear. We remember the Land’s development in vague swaths of time. Her evolution intertwines with our personal stories to replace concrete herstorian elements such as dates with broad narratives guessing at a decade based on the ex I was with at the time.

This timeline is a mere beginning—a collection of stories I heard, dates we reasoned through tracing lines of relationships, cross-checking with current lovers and available documents.

1976: First festival on 120 acres of land in Mt. Pleasant¹

Maxine Feldman performs Amazon for the first time²

Well documented from the first festival³ are stories of locals watching from telescopes to see the one- to two-thousand-womyn-strong international gathering of weirdos⁴ and voyeuristic men sneaking onto the festival land, verbally assaulting festiegoers from pickup trucks. From this need, womyn gave birth to security shifts. In that early year, even performers participated in patrolling the perimeter of Fest, and a system of horn honking alerted groups of festiegoers to gather at different entrances to the Festival, should a threatening situation need response.⁵

Falcon River attended the first festival. She says:

The thing I remember most about the festival was the sense I had finally found something that I’d be willing to fight and die for. And I just, I felt that way ever since. For womyn’s space. And we got our first opportunity at the first festival to do just that. Because men were lined up on the road with guns and telescopes. Most of us didn’t have camping gear; we just slept in our cars. We were just buck naked in the middle of a field and it was numbing cold. In the middle of the night, there were men trying to break in, and we got up and went to the south gate and womyn had link chains and tire irons and buck knives and there was a moment when a vehicle was coming toward us. Accelerating and accelerating. And we all made a line across the gate and we did not move. And at the last moment, that car. . . . They were just playing chicken, but we didn’t know—but we were willing to take it.⁶

1977: Festival moved to rented land in Hesperia⁷

Michigan piano logo commissioned from Sally Piano⁸

Shirley Jons didn’t start as the official purchasing agent for MWMF until 1982, but prior to her formal position, supplies for the land were acquired by volunteers with vehicles necessary to transport whatever material goods were needed. Shirley recalls meetings after dinner where Lisa Vogel would ask, Who has a pickup? The willing recruit would be given a handful of cash to make the purchase and (hopefully) return with the goods.⁹

1978: Brother Sun camp established¹⁰

Womyn-born-womyn intention established¹¹

1979: Differently Abled Resource Tent (DART) established

Canadian women held at Immigration¹²

1980: Sign language interpreters established on stages¹³

Women of color present list of demands to producers¹⁴

1981: Establishment of political space in

Community Center tent

First snack sold on the Land: Mama-corn¹⁵

Snacks and food sold at Festival gradually expanded to include three locations and an ice cream cart, where a womon could buy food not included in the price of her ticket. The Saints snack bar started when womyn from the Saints Collective, a lesbian bar in Boston, Massachusetts, came to Fest and asked if they could sell coffee to raise money to rebuild the space they had recently lost in Boston. They never did rebuild the bar, but The Saints by Day and by Night lived on at Michigan.¹⁶

1982: Festival moves to private land in Hart, Michigan

Traffic crew established

Largest festival ever: eight thousand women¹⁷

MWMF lost the lease to the land in Hesperia right before Fest,¹⁸ a shock to both festival organizers and the Hesperia community who, despite years of early harassment, had grown to appreciate the economic boon of Fest and had begun welcoming womyn each year with signs, T-shirts, and homemade items for sale.¹⁹

Getting electricity on the new land proved a logistical nightmare for the Electrix crew. According to Ernie Marzulla, longtime Electrix coordinator:

Lisa Vogel could not get any electrical contractor to help her on the new land. There was derision and flat refusals to be a part of a womyn’s fest. She found a contractor from Mount Pleasant with a large company who was willing to listen and treat her with respect. He worked with her for seventeen years.

The new land had no electricity. It straddles two counties and two power company’s territories. One company said flatly [electrifying the Land] could not be done. The other said if Lisa were to get permission from the [neighboring] landowner, she could lay powerline through his property, set a pole and transformer on the Land, then they—the power company—would come inspect and energize it.

Hours before the show was to go on, Lisa and Margaret Flowing Johnson were still working with the contractor from Mount Pleasant to lay powerline:

The story is that Flowing had a compass and a machete and everyone was in boots tramping through the swamp as Russell laid power line behind them. They worked through the night. The show did go on.

However, the pole and transformer set in that first year was deliberately destroyed after Fest. The