When bookstores move, staffers usually pack the books in boxes, load the boxes in a truck, and drive the truck to the new location. When Wayward Books moved, owners Sybil Pike and Doris Grumbach packed the books in grocery bags and volunteers passed them hand to hand along Pennsylvania Avenue SE to the new shop at 325 7th Street., which was practically next door to Lammas. I was one of the volunteers, and that’s how I got this T-shirt.
True, the distance was only three or four city blocks, and as I recall the brigade didn’t quite stretch the whole distance, so cars were called upon to ferry the books across the gap. But the operation was ingenious and fun, and it worked.
Wayward Books dealt in a carefully curated mix of secondhand and rare works, which meant those books had already been around. They probably took their latest move in stride.
Lammas was well represented in the Wayward Books Brigade, and not only because Wayward Books was moving into the immediate neighborhood. Pike and Grumbach had been a couple since the early 1970s, and Grumbach’s novels were regular sellers at Lammas, notably Chamber Music and The Ladies, which was based on the “Ladies of Llangollen,” two 18th-century Irish women who eloped to Wales, set up housekeeping as a married couple, and whose home became a go-to destination for literary luminaries of the time. Grumbach’s books focused on women’s lives, and often women in relationship with each other, which was not all that common at the time, especially for “mainstream” novelists.
Sybil, a retired research librarian at the Library of Congress, was the on-site manager at Wayward Books — I remember her as a strikingly handsome woman who would have been in her mid-fifties at the time — but Doris was also around when she wasn’t teaching or writing. The two shops complemented each other nicely: their inventories didn’t overlap, but their customers did.
A Washington Post story from April 1990, reporting on Wayward Books’ relocation to Sargentville, Maine, that month, notes that the Wayward Books Brigade comprised 70 volunteers and moved some 3,000 volumes from old location to new. The move to Maine involved three times that many books and was presumably not accomplished hand to hand.
The Post story also says the hand-to-hand move to 7th Street happened in 1985. I would have said a year earlier, because I left D.C. at the end of July 1985 and it seemed Wayward Books and Lammas had been neighbors for more than a few months at that point. But memory is tricky, so maybe not.
I just learned that Sybil passed in March of last year, at the age of 91, but that Doris seems to be alive in her 104th year. It sounds as though, around 2009, they moved together to a retirement community in Pennsylvania, where Sybil died and Doris still lives. Anyone with more information, please respond in the comments. If you don’t want your comment published, say so and it won’t be.
This T-shirt has nothing to do with Wayward Books — except that they both have to do with books, and that Women’s Glib was somewhat wayward in that it had to do with feminist humor, which many continue to swear is an oxymoron. Not for the first or last time, those “many” are so wrong.
Women’s Glib and Women’s Glibber, anthologies edited by Roz Warren, both came out in my bookselling days — I think. Amazon.com gives the early ’90s as pub dates for both books but notes in one case that it’s a second edition. I’m pretty sure I didn’t have anything in either book, although I was the class clown (female) in sixth grade and have been credited with having a pretty good, albeit barbed, sense of humor in all the decades since.
Interestingly enough (to me, at least), this is one of the very few — maybe even only? — Ts I have that features a book. I’ll hedge my bets on that one till I’ve excavated my whole collection. Either few books were featured on Ts or I wasn’t buying (or being given) the ones that were.
My humor tends to be in the moment — I think the word is “situational,” meaning that it arises from circumstances. I’ve never been fond of the other kind, such as stand-up, mainly because stand-up comedy back in the day was so misogynist, even when performed by one of the few women in the trade. Phyllis Diller embarrassed and infuriated me. I could admire Lucille Ball and I Love Lucy while being mortified by her tactics.
As a teenager and young adult I was a huge fan of the Smothers Brothers and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. By the time Saturday Night Live got going, in the mid to late 1970s, I was doing fine without a TV and besides, SNL didn’t seem all that in sync with the lesbian-feminist life I was living.
Humor that was in sync with my life — I loved it. Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For strip and the books compiled from it were huge hits with Lammas customers. So were Nicole Hollander’s Sylvia books. They kept us laughing, and they kept us sane.
The first stand-up comedian who made me sit up, take notice, and even buy at least one of her albums was Kate Clinton. I heard her perform live in the early ’80s. What a revelation! The problem with stand-up comedy wasn’t me, it was the sexist, heterosexist comedy itself!
I’m thrilled to report that Roz Warren and Kate Clinton are still “making light,” as an early Clinton album had it, and you’ve almost certainly heard of Alison Bechdel, if not of Dykes to Watch Out For. I’m not sure if Nicole Hollander is still creating, but it’s not hard to find Sylvia online.
Sylvia — that Sylvia — was one of the namesakes of the TRS-80 that was Lammas’s and my first computer. The other two, as I think I mentioned before, were Sylvia Sherman, my high school history teacher, and Sylvia Abrams, my editorial mentor, without whom I would have had a hard time making a living these last four decades.
Like all feminist bookstores, Lammas was a hub for the feminist and lesbian communities of the D.C. area, but because D.C. itself is a hub for the nation and the world, women from all over sought out Lammas when they were in town for conferences, school trips, vacation, you name it.
The librarians were my favorite. They’d come in from all around the Mid-Atlantic region and beyond, especially from small cities, towns, and rural areas with no feminist bookstore in reach. They’d nearly always have shopping lists, gleaned from feminist publications and word of mouth, and often dropped two or three hundred bucks in a visit.
Where did my T from the 14th Women and the Law conference come from? I didn’t attend, though it was indeed in D.C. An attendee might have given it to me, or it might have been left behind at the shop. I like the design: it illustrates how effective black & white can be.
Was the conference still being held? A Google search turned up several conferences with similar names, but none of them dated back this far. off our backs devoted about half of its May 1983 issue (vol. 13, no. 5) to the 14th conference; you can view it online at JSTOR, but you’ll need a JSTOR subscription to download it.
Searching on the full conference name, in quotes — “National Conference on Women and the Law” — yielded paydirt: a 1994 article by Elizabeth M. Schneider: “Feminist Lawmaking and Historical Consciousness: Bringing the Past into the Future.” (Published in the Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law, vol. 2, no. 1, it’s now available as a free PDF download, but the godawful URL is four lines long. Go to BrooklynWorks, “open-access scholarship from Brooklyn Law School,” and you can search for it there.) It’s worth the trip. Schneider writes that the conference, which was held from 1970 through 1992, “played a crucial role in shaping feminist legal history over the last twenty-five years.”
Lammas occasionally went on the road as well, and that’s how I came by “Sisterhood Is Blooming / Spring Will Never Be the Same”: selling books at a women’s conference at West Virginia University in (I’m guessing here) 1983 or 1984. The keynote speaker was Maya Angelou, and my main visual memory of the conference was of being near the back of a vast, packed gymnasium with Angelou onstage at the other end.
I’ve never been comfortable in crowds of mostly strangers, but I did fine when I had a role to play, and it didn’t get much better than selling feminist books and records to women who didn’t have ready access to either except by mail-order. Lammas owner-manager Mary Farmer was far more gregarious than I ever was. As a Ladyslipper distributor, she was often on the road in her big red Olds, visiting record stores or selling records at women’s music concerts. I was just as happy holding the fort at home.
December got away from me, as it often does, but I’m back! My last few posts have focused on music, and this one does too.
I was down to the last two music-related T-shirts from my D.C. days and couldn’t figure out how to tie them together. Should each one maybe get its own short post?
Me in my Ladyslipper T in 2021. This design was “vintage” by the time I acquired it, probably after I started working at Lammas.. It’s unusual in my collection both for its long sleeves and its French cut. The long sleeves mean it gets worn regularly in spring and fall.
Then I got it: These two Ts, one from Ladyslipper Music and one from Hot Wire: The Journal of Women’s Music & Culture, both represent the national and international aspect of women’s music, but I had an up-close-and-personal relationship with both of them. I contributed a couple of articles to Hot Wire, including the one about the D.C. Area Feminist Chorus. At Lammas, I shared the upstairs office with Flo Hollis, a full-time Ladyslipper staffer, Lammas owner-manager Mary Farmer was a Ladyslipper distributor, and the code for the Lammas alarm system was Ladyslipper’s PO box number: 3124.
Turns out there was another close connection. Hot Wire has made all 30 of the issues it published between November 1984 and September 1995 available for free as downloadable PDFs, but rather than search each one for articles about Ladyslipper — I was 100% certain they had to have published at least one — I Googled. Imagine my surprise when the story I turned up had been written by me.
OMG. Turned out the date in that citation, May 1985, was wrong — Hot Wire didn’t publish an issue that month — but another reference to the same article had the correct date, March 1985. I downloaded the whole issue and read my own words from almost 37 years ago.
From Hot Wire, vol. 1, no. 2 (March 1985)
No question, it sounds like me. Many of the details came roaring back from my memory; others I’d never forgotten. Some of it I had no recollection of at all. What impresses me the most going on four decades later is the account of how the Ladyslippers dealt with a complete communications breakdown among the three full-time staff members in the winter of 1982–83. “What often happens in such situations,” I wrote, “is that one person leaves, and the level of tension drops for a while.” But at Ladyslipper, as staffer Sue Brown noted, “everyone was too stubborn to leave.”
So they went into counseling as a group. As I wrote, “They were not prepared for the speed and intensity with which issues came to the surface.” In retrospect, Liz Snow described the experience as “shocking.” They continued in counseling for “about ten months.” No one abandoned ship. Ladyslipper did not fall apart; it continued to develop as a major force in the women’s music and culture scene for as long as there was one.
By then I’d had plenty of experience with groups that foundered on their inability and/or unwillingness to work things through. I’d left the Women’s Center collective because the group dynamics were driving me crazy and I had no idea what to do about it. So Ladyslipper’s example was an inspiration: with hard work and, most likely, some help from the outside, we could get through the rough places.*
Fans of Dykes To Watch Out For will immediately recognize the image as the work of Alison Bechdel, who went on to international fame as the author of the graphic memoir Fun Home and other works. We really did know her when.
Which brings me back to those 30 issues of Hot Wire, all available for free download. What a treasure! They’re indispensable, sure, for anyone interested in the stars and rising stars of the women’s music scene of the 1980s and ’90s, but note how many articles are devoted to how-tos and behind-the-scenes movement building. We were starting from scratch in those days, pretty much building the plane as we were flying it, because there were so few experts to learn from.
At the same time, we knew we hadn’t come out of nowhere. Enough others had tended enough fires to leave sparks. It’s a relief to know that the fires are still being tended, and the sparks are still out there, like fireflies on a summer night.
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notes
* I don’t need to say (do I?) that these problems are not unique to feminist groups. After I moved to Martha’s Vineyard, I found no shortage of examples of groups that either fell apart or drove some of their most valuable members out. Not infrequently those who left would start a new group whose purpose duplicated or overlapped with the old. When the Vineyard finally discovered AIDS, around 1990, it became apparent that various complementary organizations either weren’t aware of or weren’t on speaking terms with each other. More about that later.
Me looking stern in my 1983 Sisterfire T. The blue hat doesn’t quite work with the shirt and shorts, IMO. 2018 selfie.
Sisterfire is the only women’s music festival I ever attended. Both my T-shirts call it “an open-air celebration of women artists,” so it wasn’t just about music, but music was the main event. I was never seriously tempted by other music festivals, which were proliferating in all parts of the country in the 1980s. Partly it was that, working in a feminist bookstore and living in a lesbian community as I did, I didn’t need to travel to hang out with other dykes. Mostly I wasn’t and never have been comfortable in crowds of people I don’t know.
Even crowds of all women.
Back of the 1985 Sisterfire shirt. Pretty impressive lineup, no? The D.C. Area Feminist Chorus is in the middle, right above Diane Lindsay & Sue Fink.
I have, however, been known to enjoy myself in very large groups if I have a role to play. At Sisterfire I was part of the Lammas/Ladyslipper team, selling mostly records but some books as well. In 1985, the D.C. Area Feminist Chorus, in which I was then singing, was one of the street performers, so you’ll find its name on the back of the Sisterfire shirt for that year. Chorus members performed wearing the chorus’s own shirt, and you bet I’ve still got mine. It’s got its own story to tell and will get to tell it soon.
Me looking less stern and more color-coordinated in my 1985 Sisterfire T. 2018 selfie.
Sisterfire’s other compelling attraction was location: it took place in the close-in D.C. suburb of Takoma Park, Maryland. It was founded in 1982 by Amy Horowitz and the D.C.-based production company Roadwork, and the T-shirts testify that I was there in 1983 and 1985.
I left town in a U-Haul truck not long after that year’s Sisterfire, which my T-shirt says was on June 22 & 23, but Sisterfire continued into the late ’80s, not without controversy, not least because men could attend. I don’t remember the male presence being distracting or disruptive. On one hot afternoon, I do remember the announcer asking men to keep their shirts on because thanks to local ordinances and conventions women couldn’t take ours off.*
By the early 1980s, Roadwork was, in community terms, a powerhouse, booking national tours for the likes of Sweet Honey in the Rock and Holly Near and producing such standout concerts as the Varied Voices of Black Women (1978) and Cris Williamson’s appearance at Constitution Hall (1980). Naturally we sometimes snarkily referred to it as Roadhog, and a local graphic artist sported a brilliant parody of the 1983 Sisterfire shirt: it looked just like the official one till you realized the letters spelled out SISTERBLITZ.
Equinox Productions was a grassroots women’s production company — “group” is probably a better word, because they were all volunteers — formed to produce gigs too modest to get Roadwork’s attention.
One major benefit of Equinox and similar groups was the opportunity they gave women to develop skills in areas we’d been generally shut out of, like concert production and sound tech. D.C.-based Woman Sound, owned and managed by audio engineer Boden Sandstrom,[1] was a pioneer in the field and highly professional by the time this article appeared in the June 22, 1981, Washington Post.
By the time I moved back to D.C. in 1977, women’s music’s center of gravity — Olivia Records and the recording artists associated with it — had moved to the West Coast, but D.C. still had a thriving local music scene. Food for Thought, a popular vegetarian restaurant on Connecticut Ave., frequently featured live music; performers got paid by passing the hat. At least once singer-songwriter Casse Culver came down from the upstairs dressing room after her set, bandana masking her face like a Wild West bandit, and conducted pass-the-hat as a stickup. You probably couldn’t get away with that now, but at the time it was hilarious.
My favorite local musicians at the time included singer-songwriter Judy Reagan and the blues duo of Abbe Lyons and Cheryl Jacobs. Church basements and college classrooms[2] were popular year-round venues, and music could regularly be heard at rallies, demonstrations, and Gay & Lesbian Pride Day every June.
Sophie’s Parlor, the women’s radio collective’s show on WPFW-FM, was part of the mix, featuring interviews, books, and more as well as music. I’m pretty sure that this shirt was given to me by my Lammas colleague Deb Morris, who continued in the book biz long after I left and with whom (thanks to Facebook) I’m back in touch.
Sophie’s Parlor still has a weekly show on WPFW-FM. Wow. Its Facebook page says it’s “the oldest continuously running women’s music radio collective in the United States,” which is more than remarkable. The FB page also notes that it was founded at Georgetown University in 1972. I dropped out of GU halfway through my junior year, in December 1971; I remained in D.C. for the next few months, but I wasn’t aware of Sophie’s at that time. Next step is to see if I can livestream their weekly show: Wednesdays @ 3 p.m. EST.
I’ve long had a mild hankering to do a radio show — mild enough that I never sought out an opportunity to actually do it, and no opportunity ever presented itself. The closest I ever came was getting to pick what got played on the Lammas record player whenever I was working the floor. (Often I worked upstairs, keeping inventory on 5×8 file cards, one for each title, and placing orders. This was in the pre-digital age.) This was often how customers first heard the latest Cris Williamson or Holly Near, since they weren’t getting airplay in radioland, and of course we took requests. On Valentine’s Day every year I’d play all the shit-kicking anti-love songs I knew of. Favorites included Therese Edell’s “Winter of ’76,” Judy Reagan’s “Dispose of Properly,” and a whole bunch of Willie Tyson songs. Sample:
This is the back cover photo of Judy Reagan’s album Old Friends. I can name at least three-quarters of the women in it. That’s Judy at the top (you probably guessed this already). Photo by Morgan Gwenwald, used with permission.
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Notes
Curious fact: These four music shirts, all from the first half of the 1980s, are all muscle shirts, i.e., sleeveless. What makes this noteworthy is that I have maybe ten muscle shirts total in my extensive collection, and the others vary in subject: one’s goddess-related (you can see it at the bottom of the pagans post), one’s a dragon, and one’s from Smedley’s bookshop in Ithaca, N.Y. (that one will be along shortly), etc. So why (1) are so many of my muscle shirts music-related? and (2) did they go out of fashion?
* For more about Sisterfire’s early years, and why it didn’t happen in 1986, see Nancy Seeger, “Sisterfire: Why Did Roadwork Skip 1986,” Hot Wire: The Journal of Women’s Music and Culture, vol. 2, no. 4 (November 1986), p. 28. All of Hot Wire‘s 30 issues are available online as downloadable PDFs. You can find this one here. The story notes that in 1985 a petition opposing Sisterfire circulated in Takoma Park. Reasons included traffic and parking, noise, “the smell of marijuana smoke,” and “some women attending the festival wore no shirts.”
[1] Boden, then going by Barbara, is credited as engineering assistant, to veteran engineer Marilyn Ries, on Casse Culver’s 1976 LP Three Gypsies (Urana Records, founded by Marilyn Ries and K Gardner). The June 1981 WaPo story says that Woman Sound was then coming up on its sixth anniversary, which would have put its founding around the time Three Gypsies was being recorded.
While poking around online (I’ve been doing a lot of that while working on The T-Shirt Chronicles), I came across this tribute by Boden for her friend and mentor Tommy Linthicum, who passed away in 2007. In it she explains how she got into biz: Casse was looking for someone to train to run her sound. They eventually became partners.
[2] Particularly at George Washington University, where Lisa C., the office manager for the Women’s Studies department, was a frequent collaborator for both musical and literary events.
During my sojourn in England in 1974–75, I discovered unsliced bread. When I returned to the States in late November 1975, I discovered that sliced bread — at least what was available in the western suburbs of Boston at the time — didn’t measure up. After my Grandma died in February 1976, I moved into her (large) house to take care of it and her Lab, Max. In her big country kitchen I taught myself to make bread. I taught myself out of a paperback book because there were no bakers in my family. As I recall, I caught on quickly. One attempt did turn into the proverbial brick, but that was it.
Apart from almost five years when I was living in an apartment with no oven,1 I have been baking my own bread ever since. Bread is pretty much my only culinary accomplishment. If I don’t bring some form of bread to potlucks, people wonder if I’m OK. For about 25 years in a row I won ribbons for my yeast breads at the annual Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society fair. (Full disclosure: The yeast bread categories were nowhere near as competitive as the quick breads, and forget about brownies and cookies.)
Considering how central bread has been to my daily life for so long, it’s surprising that this is my only bread-related T-shirt. Even more surprising, to me anyway, is that I don’t remember how I came by it. I’ve never been to Gladewater, Texas, so someone must have given it to me, but I don’t recall who. A Google search tells me that Glory Bee Baking Co. closed its doors in 2010. Even though I’d never been there, that made me sad.
Independent bakeries have something in common with independent bookstores, and to paraphrase John Donne, the death of any one of them diminishes me and the communities I’m part of. Just up the street from Lammas Bookstore was the Women’s Community Bakery, which (as I just learned from Googling) closed in 1992.
“Just up the street” I say, but Pennsylvania Avenue SE was like a moat and for all the time I spent in the neighborhood I rarely crossed it.2 I had plenty of opportunities to sample their wares, however, with an emphasis on the cookies, muffins, and other non-bread offerings. If the Women’s Community Bakery ever had its own T-shirt, it must have passed me by.
I do still have my copy of Uprisings: The Whole Grain Bakers’ Book, published in 1983, which includes recipes from more than 30 independent bakeries, including the Women’s Community Bakery. It’s a handsome, spiral-bound volume, with each bakery’s section hand-lettered in its own distinctive style, and the introductory pages cover just about everything you need to know about bread baking if you’ve never done it before.
I rarely baked anything from it because so many of the ingredients could not be found in the supermarkets or ethnic groceries near me. Malt syrup? Millet flour? Soy margarine? Turned-down page corners and check marks do indicate that I tried some of them, though. These days exotic ingredients are easier to find, at least on Martha’s Vineyard, and I’m more confident about improvising and substituting than I was four decades ago, so maybe I’ll try again.
What I lack in bread-related T-shirts, I make up for in items related to bread-baking. Not surprisingly, many of these have been given to me by housemates and others with a vested interest in my continuing to make bread. These include my big bread bowl, my green-marble rolling pin, and my copy of Beard on Bread, which is held together with strapping tape. (See photo. My other most used book, Floss and Stan Dworkin’s Bake Your Own Bread, is in three pieces.)
The largest gift is the table I knead bread on. This was rescued from a Mount Pleasant (D.C.) alley by onetime housemate Beverly, she who also made my Feminism Is a Lesbian Plotshirt. Being handy with tools, she installed dowels to stabilize it, and voilà, the perfect kneading table. It’s accompanied me on all my many moves over more than four decades because most kitchen counters are the wrong height for kneading, at least if you’re very slightly over five-foot-four. In between bakings, it masquerades as an ordinary worktable, barely visible under the stacks of files, notebooks, and loose papers piled upon it.
Bread baker’s corner, with kneaded dough ready to be cut into loaves
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notes
1. This jumps ahead to Martha’s Vineyard, where affordable year-round housing was in crisis before I arrived in 1985 but denial was epidemic among the comfortably housed and it’s only been in the last few years that most people started to acknowledge that the situation was desperate. Landlords and tenants collude in evading local bylaws on what constitutes an apartment by omitting stoves from the dwelling. I cooked my meals with a hotplate and microwave, which worked fine — but I couldn’t bake bread. This was in the mid-2000s, from 2002 to 2007.
2. Phase 1, aka “the Phase,” one of the few lesbian-friendly bars in D.C. at the time, was also “just up the street,” across Pennsylvania Ave. on Eighth Street, but if I went there more than half a dozen times in my D.C. years I’d be surprised. I’ve never been a bar person. The Phase closed in 2016 (or maybe 2015, according to one website). The area around Lammas was its own self-contained neighborhood, anchored by Eastern Market, which is still there, seems to be thriving in an upscale sort of way, and even has its own website. I was in Eastern Market several times a week, usually looking for either a pulled-pork sandwich or Doris’s hamantaschen.
Apart from the cool slogan and great design, this shirt is distinctive for a couple of other reasons. I don’t have any other shirts in this color (what is it? “rust”?), and it’s one of the few I have in what used to be called “French cut” and now seems to be “women’s,” as opposed to “unisex.”
No, I wasn’t on the 1978 American Women’s Himalayan Expedition to Annapurna. I’ve never had any desire to climb anything that required more than the ability to walk upright. I first learned about the expedition when expedition leader Arlene Blum’s gorgeous book about it came out in 1980. Though the story went places I’d never been, it started in instantly recognizable territory: with the sexism and outright misogyny of the male mountain-climbing elite. I also recognized the powerful determination of women adepts in any male-dominated field to show the men that they are wrong.
I bought the T-shirt when Dr. Blum spoke in D.C. What year was it? I don’t remember, but I’m guessing 1981. Where did she speak? I don’t recall that either. Was I already working at Lammas then? I’ll only know that if I can find an exact date for the event. For sure it didn’t take place at the shop, whose 400 square feet of selling space were far too small for talks and readings. Where did it take place? Once again I’m drawing a blank.[1]
My indelible memory is of Arlene Blum herself, or, more accurately, of my impression of her. In my mind’s eye she has long wavy dark hair, as she does in the Annapurna photos. She is tall, but she seems dressed to look smaller and younger than she is, in a purple and black dress that stops several inches above her knees. She’s trying to look like a schoolgirl, I thought at the time.
Which probably wasn’t her intent, and her dress may not have been purple and black either, but that’s what struck me: this physically and emotionally strong and highly intelligent (she had a doctorate in biochemistry) woman seemed to be downplaying all the traits that made her achievement possible. I’m guessing that she wasn’t nearly as comfortable with the whole book tour routine as she was organizing expeditions, climbing mountains, and doing research — building and leading teams rather than speaking to strangers whom she’d never see again.
By this time, I’d read and devoured Adrienne Rich’s collection The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977. I know this for sure: I wrote my name and “Sept. 78” on the flyleaf of the book, a trade paperback that split along the spine maybe three decades ago from repeated readings. It includes Rich’s 1974 “Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev,” written for the leader of an all-women team that perished in a storm on Lenin Peak in August 1974. Narrated in Shatayev’s voice after death, it includes lines from the diary she wrote while she was living, like these:
Now we are readyand each of us knows it I have never loved
like this I have never seen
my own forces so taken up and shared
and given back
After the long training the early sieges
we are moving almost effortlessly in our love[2]
Visiting Arlene Blum’s website just now, I noticed a link for “Peak Lenin” in the Mountaineer section. The year was 1974. The coincidence of place and year gave me goosebumps, but the accompanying slide show was even more startling: Arlene Blum and her climbing buddies and Elvira Schatayeva and her team, along with other mountain-climbers, were all at base camp at Peak Lenin at the same time. Arlene was almost caught by the same storms that killed the Russian women. The slide show includes images of Elvira, known to her friends as Eva.
A cable of blue fire ropes our bodiesburning together in the snow We will not liveto settle for less We have dreamed of this
all of our lives
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notes
[1] To further confuse my already flummoxed memory, I just Googled Arlene Blum Annapurna Washington Post. This turned up a Washington Post story from December 9, 1980, that had Blum in town for an American Alpine Club meeting. This would have been shortly after the book came out. Did she give a public talk then, and did I attend it? If so, I definitely wasn’t working at Lammas, and it might explain why my sketchy memory of the venue doesn’t ring any bells. Another story, from April 1983, refers to a lecture Blum has just given, but it and the article itself focus on her 2,000-mile trek from one end of the Himalayas to the other. The talk I attended was definitely about Annapurna, so I’m pretty sure it wasn’t that one.
[2] Both this and the quote at the end are from Adrienne Rich’s “Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev,” in The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978).
Georgetown University is a Jesuit-run Catholic institution, and when I was there, 1969–1971, Catholic undergraduates were required to take four semesters of theology. Non-Catholics could take theology, but I opted for the alternative requirement, a two-year, four-semester course called Comparative Civilizations, aka “Comp Civ.” This was taught by Father Sebes, a diminutive older Jesuit whose academic background was in Far Eastern studies. The course covered Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Taoism, and might (can’t remember for sure) have included some mention of the various flavors of Christianity. We referred to it as Pagan I and Pagan II.[1]
What was my image of “pagan” at that point? Surely I associated “pagan” with the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome, with the likes of Socrates, Plato, and Julius Caesar. The myths were interesting, but they were “back then,” history, and ancient history at that. Besides, the Christians had vanquished the pagans, right?
That changed big-time when I moved back to D.C. in 1977 and came out into lesbian and feminist communities that had been discussing religion, spirituality, ancient history, and related issues for years, and not with academic detachment either. Paganism, loosely defined or not defined at all, was alive, lively, and everywhere. Interest in Wicca, especially of the women-only Dianic sort, had been growing and deepening at at least a decade. (Diana and her Greek counterpart, Artemis, being the very rare goddesses who had as little to do with men as possible.)
Take Lammas Bookstore, where I quickly became a regular customer and eventually, in 1981, the book buyer. Founded in 1973, Lammas was named for the cross-quarter day between the summer solstice and the fall equinox. Before I moved back to D.C., I doubt I knew what a cross-quarter day was.
Someone must have given this to me, but I can’t remember who. This was a popular slogan. It was guaranteed to piss humorless Christians off.
The triumph of Christianity over paganism, considered a civilizational advance by the winners (surprise surprise), had also marked the “triumph” of a solitary male god over a pantheon that included goddesses as well as gods. As it turned out, over the centuries and millennia the goddesses in those pantheons had been losing power and status to the gods. In the myths I learned growing up, Hera had power but Zeus had more. It had not always been so.
I came to see Mary in a new light, as a vestige of the once powerful goddesses. The relentless male supremacists of the early Christian Church hadn’t been able to stamp her out. They co-opted her instead. Paradoxically enough, the intensely sexist and often misogynist Catholicism I’d encountered at Georgetown had a female side that the Episcopalianism I’d grown up with lacked.
The Christians were adept at co-opting what they couldn’t entirely suppress. Many major Christian holidays piggy-backed (that’s a polite term for it) on the old pagan solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarter days: Christmas is Yule (winter solstice), Easter (spring equinox), and so on. The pagan year began with Samhain, Halloween, which I like most of my cohort learned about as a kid in single digits.[2] Clearly there was much more to it than trick-or-treating.
Getting ready to pop the cork at a Lammas anniversary celebration. From left: Liz Snow of Ladyslipper, Lammas owner Mary Farmer, me, Tina Lunson (printer), and Deb Morris. Probably 1983.
Lammas celebrated its anniversary every year with champagne and a big sale; the ceiling of the Seventh Street store was cork-pocked from those celebrations. Lesbian households might observe the various pagan/wiccan holidays, and often enough there were well-attended public rituals that featured singing, poetry, and lots of candles. We identified ourselves to each other by the jewelry we wore (pentacles, labryses,[3] goddess figures), the greetings we exchanged, and of course our T-shirts.
Pulling off my shelves the books that I devoured then and haven’t let go of, I can’t help noticing how many were published in 1979, just as my curiosity was flowering:
Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance, which introduced me and countless others to the Wheel of the Year and wiccan rituals
Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon, a journalist’s in-depth survey of, as the subtitle put it, “Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today” (an expanded edition was released in 1984)[4]
Merlin Stone’s two-volume Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood: Our Goddess and Heroine Heritage, a compilation of goddess stories from every continent inhabited by humans
Part 1 of Z. Budapest’s The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries (part 2 came out in 1980)
Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels, which explored the early texts that didn’t make it into the Christian canon, in which God was seen as both Mother and Father
JEB’s Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians, which includes several witchy photos and witchy quotes
Lunar imagery was everywhere, and lunar calendars were popular. The connection to women’s cycles is not coincidental.
The previous year’s crop is just as impressive. Among the feminist essentials with major pagan connections published in 1978 were Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology, Sally Gearhart’s The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women, Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, and the paperback of Merlin Stone’s When God Was a Woman.
Considering the time it takes to produce a book-length work, from research and writing through to physically producing it and getting it into the hands of interested readers, it was obvious the cauldron had been bubbling for quite some time.
For women awakening to feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the past looked like a wasteland. But once women got to work researching and revisiting, rethinking and rearranging, the desert bloomed. For us coming of age in the 1960s, ’70s, and into the ’80s, as women’s studies professor Bonnie Morris writes, “It became second nature to have to look hard for lost history.” She compares it to “the upbeat excitement of a fierce girl detective searching for clues.”[5]
Among many other things, we learned that men called women “witches” in order to persecute, prosecute, and not infrequently kill them, and that this often had little or nothing to do with religion. Women who used herbs, touch, and common sense to heal were said to be practicing magic — exercising powers that men didn’t have and didn’t understand. As the male-dominated medical profession rose in influence, female healers were marginalized, their wisdom dismissed as superstition and “old wives’ tales.”[6]
The history that could be documented or otherwise proven beyond reasonable doubt was crucial, but so were the improvisations, the mythmaking and rituals, inspired by it. Some of the most-quoted lines of grassroots feminism came from Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères, published in 1969 and translated into English in 1971. They describe pretty well what we were up to: “There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember . . . You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.”
Remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.
Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères
NOTES
[1] A Google search just turned up this short Washington Postpiece about the course from 1993. It confirms my memory that Father Sebes’s background was indeed in Far Eastern studies; while living in China from 1940 to 1947, he spent part of the time interned by the Japanese. It disputes my description of him as “older”: born in 1915, he was only a few years older than my parents, who were both born in 1922. The author writes that “Comp Civ” was popularly known as “Buddhism for Baptists,” but I never heard it called that — and why Baptists? I couldn’t have told you which of my non-Catholic classmates came from Baptist households. Protestant denominations were all lumped together as “Other.”
[2] Halloween was also my mother’s birthday. I could tell a few stories about that, but instead I’ll tell one that my mother repeated fairly often. Her father (an embittered, said-to-be-brilliant upper-crusty WASP man) would tell her “You were born on Halloween so you’re a witch. If you’d been born a day later, you would have been a saint.” Nov. 1 being All Saints Day in many Christian calendars. Witches to me were Halloween, the Salem witch trials, and The Wizard of Oz. Glinda to the contrary, my associations weren’t positive.
[3] The labrys, a double-headed axe, originated in ancient Crete and has been adopted especially by lesbian feminists as a symbol of female strength. It was all over the place in the 1970s and beyond, on T-shirts and pottery, in jewelry and artwork. There are two classic examples in my Mary Daly blog post, one on a T-shirt and one in Mary’s hands. Mary was a hardcore labrys fan.
[4] One of life’s little synchronicities: Margot Adler and her longtime partner, John Gliedman, had their handfasting at the Lambert’s Cove Inn in West Tisbury when I was a chambermaid there: June 18, 1988, I’m told by this very good biographical article about her. The inn hosted many weddings during the years I worked there (1988 to 1970 or maybe 1971), but this was by far the best. I was just reminded that Adler’s middle name was Susanna, spelled the way I spell it.
[5] In The Disappearing L: Erasure of Lesbian Spaces and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016). I hope The T-Shirt Chronicles will do its bit to push back against this erasure.
[6] In one of the many, many instances of reclaiming that have characterized feminism, “Old Wives Tales” was the name of San Francisco’s feminist bookstore. An excellent source on the how patriarchal medicine stigmatized women healers is Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. First published in 1976, it’s still in print.
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Three more from my wardrobe. Left: The words say “Buto, Egyptian cobra goddess of protection.” Center: The flip side says “and the moon sees me.” This goes back at least to an English nursery rhyme of the late 18th century, but it and its variations show up in quite a few songs and kids’ books. Right: The image is inspired by prehistoric cave paintings. The theory is that these uncredited artworks were often created by women.
Persephone Press died in May 1983. Social media was decades in the future, but word spread through the feminist print network almost that fast. I still remember standing stock-still when I heard the news, unable to take it in. I was at Lammas, surrounded by the Persephone books that I sold every day, crucial, path-breaking books in the feminist and lesbian world. Lesbian Fiction, Lesbian Poetry, Nice Jewish Girls, This Bridge Called My Back, The Coming Out Stories, The Wanderground . . . Gone? Just like that?
The Persephone Press titles that are on my shelves today.
Well, no, not quite. By then I was well aware of the economic tightrope that a small, undercapitalized bookstore had to walk day in, day out, to keep books on the shelves. I had some idea of the similar constraints that publishers operated under, but somehow I’d assumed that Persephone was exempt. No matter how well you know the technical details, magical thinking has a way of working its way into mind and heart when you need to believe.[1]
I couldn’t imagine a world in which Persephone didn’t exist, but the unimaginable had happened. Persephone was gone.
Persephone Press was brilliant. It didn’t invent the anthology format, but it recognized how perfectly suited it was to feminist publishing at that particular time. So many women were moved — inspired, compelled, driven — to write because so little of what was out there reflected our lives or answered our questions. We wrote what we wanted and needed to read.
But most of us had to work our writing time in around our jobs, our political and other volunteer activities, and our family responsibilities. Sometimes we were learning our craft almost from scratch, which meant struggling to overcome everything we’d learned along the way about what good writing was and who was entitled to write. It helped to find sisters on the same journey so we could assure each other that we weren’t crazy, we could do it, and what we had to say was important.
Novels and other book-length works can be written under such conditions, but shorter ones are easier not only to finish but to get out into the world in print and/or in performance. Not surprisingly, the most accomplished writing emerging from the grassroots feminist movement from the late 1960s into the ’80s consisted of poetry, short stories and essays, and novels, more or less in that order.
Unfortunately, that was pretty much the opposite of what most readers wanted to buy, and bookstores specialized in, well, books. We carried newspapers and journals, of course, and they published short-form writing of all sorts, but they also had a short shelf life. Anthologies combined the best of both forms. They brought together important new, recent, and sometimes not-so-recent writing that was otherwise scattered across time and multiple journals of limited circulation. They could combine poems, stories, and essays between the same two covers. They took longer to produce, but they stuck around a lot longer. In addition, the works collected into a well-edited anthology communicate with each other simply because they’re in the same place at the same time. The whole, in other words, is even greater than the sum of its parts.[2]
Persephone’s anthologies had no precedents. At the time, most of their contributors were known, if they had published at all, only in limited circles, but many of them went on to become widely known and read far beyond the feminist print world. After the crash, most Persephone titles were picked up by other publishers and remained in print for years if not decades. The fourth edition of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color — “a work which by the mere fact of its existence changed the face of feminism in the United States”[3] — was brought out in 2015 by SUNY Press.
Now I look at the numbers — four titles published in 1980, and four in 1981 — and wonder What were they thinking? Most of these were physically big books. Several were going to take a while to reach their audience, like the reprint of Matilda Joslyn Gage’s amazing Woman, Church & State (1893). Anything with “lesbian” in the title and the lesbian romance Choices were going to sell well in the feminist, lesbian, and gay worlds, but those worlds were were not large.
Not to mention — for an undercapitalized publishing company “selling well” could turn into a curse. Invoices were supposed to be paid in 30 days, but undercapitalized bookstores were often doing well to pay in 60. The printing bills, in other words, were going to come due long before they could be paid out of cash flow.
And they did.
What were they thinking?
The recriminations that followed Persephone’s demise were so widespread and so bitter that Persephone’s existence seems to have been erased except for those who know where to look. I wasn’t privy to any of the dealings between press and authors, and I’m not going to repeat what I heard second, third, and fourth hand, but a short article that appeared in the November 1983 off our backs provides some insight. Three significant points:
“Because their books were selling well, they were constantly back on the press. This tied up $40,000 to $50,000 in printing and production costs, which added to the cost of overhead, and bringing out new titles was more than Persephone could handle.”
Cofounders Pat McGloin and Gloria Greenfield “[decided] to consistently operate their press according to feminist ideals. They paid royalties to their authors twice the standard paid by the publishing industry, and refused to allocate a lion’s share of their promotions budget to one best seller and and distribute what was left to the other books.”
Greenfield and McGloin expressed disappointment with the lack of support from the feminist community.[4]
Short version: Persephone’s business plan played fast and loose with real-world economic realities, and the “feminist community” didn’t step up to close the gap. In addition, the scheduled books that never got published, like Barbara Smith’s Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, and the published books that didn’t get adequately supported, like Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, were by women of color, whose publishing options at the time were the most limited.[5]
Plenty of anger was directed at Pat and Gloria, and Pat and Gloria seem to have directed at least some of theirs at “the feminist community,” but I suspect that deep down much of rage and frustration was directed at the economic system that thwarted our needs and our expectations as women, as feminists, as lesbians. Persephone’s 15-book list made it so clear what we were capable of, had given us so much to hope for, and capitalist economics, coupled with lack of organizational and individual support, had cut us off at the knees.[6]
Gazing now at my Persephone Press T-shirt, I’m tempted to take “A Lesbian Strategy” as a cruel, unintentional joke. Had our strategy, if that’s what it was, come to a dead end? Then I remember all the writers and works that Persephone encouraged, and the effects they’ve had on the world we live in now. Most of those whose lives have been enriched by Persephone’s legacy probably don’t know her name, and for those who do the legacy is tinged with understandable bitterness and regret.
After Persephone died, I tried to write a eulogy. It was a poem, three or four pages long; I wasn’t satisfied with it, and I’ve long since lost track of the whole thing, but I liked part of it so much I put it on a postcard:
She comes back indeed.
notes
[1] The dangers of magical thinking carried to extremes were laid out brilliantly by James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon) in her 1976 story “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!” Its protagonist believes she’s living in a city where misogyny doesn’t exist and it’s safe to be on the road at night. Spoiler alert: it’s not.
[2] Here are some of the anthologies on my shelves that were published in the 1980s, almost all by feminist presses. To keep it relatively brief, I haven’t included strictly fiction anthos.
For Lesbians Only: A Separatist Anthology, ed. Sarah Lucia Hoagland and Julia Penelope, Onlywomen Press, 1988
Out from Under: Sober Dykes & Our Friends, ed. Jean Swallow, Spinsters, Ink, 1983
Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry, ed. Frédérique Delacoste and Priscilla Alexander, Cleis Press, 1987
Shadow on a Tightrope: Writings by Women on Fat Oppression, ed. Lisa Schoenfielder and Barb Wieser, Aunt Lute Books, 1983
That’s What She Said: Contemporary Poetry and Fiction by Native American Women, ed. Rayna Green, Indiana University Press, 1984
The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women’s Anthology, ed. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and Irena Klepfisz, Sinister Wisdom 29/30, 1986
With the Power of Each Breath: A Disabled Women’s Anthology, ed. Susan E. Browne, Debra Connors, and Nanci Stern, Cleis Press, 1985
Women-Identifed Women, ed. Trudy Darty and Sandee Potter, Mayfield, 1984.
[3]Feminist Collections, vol. 5, no. 1 (fall 1983).This is one of the best contemporary Persephone post-mortems I’ve found yet. Feminist Collections was an indispensable quarterly review of women’s studies resources out of the University of Wisconsin, then edited by Susan Searing and Catherine Loeb. In 2018 it morphed into Resources for Gender and Women’s Studies: A Feminist Review.
[4] Mary Kay Lefevour, “Persephone Press Folds,” off our backs (November 1983), p. 17.
[5] I read Zami as soon as it came out, but my original copy went wandering. I almost certainly brought it with me to Martha’s Vineyard, but probably I lent it to someone and — well, it went wandering. The copy I have now was reprinted by Crossing Press after it was acquired by Ten Speed Press in 2002. The cover is new, but “Text design by Pat McGloin” on the copyright page clearly indicates that the text itself is from the first edition. There’s no indication anywhere that Audre Lorde died in 1992. At least one edition has appeared since with a different cover, but it too seems to use the text from the first edition. I just found this excellent 2014 assessment of Audre Lorde’s importance — and who kept her words alive till the wider world was ready to “discover” her. The author is Nancy K. Bereano, editor of Crossing Press’s Feminist Series until she left to found Firebrand Books. Several publishers continued the work of Persephone Press, but if I had to single out two of them, they’d be Firebrand and Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.
[6] See note 1.
This note was tucked into my well-worn copy of The Wanderground. Dated 13 Dec. [1979], it’s addressed to Carol Anne [Douglas] and off our backs women: “Here is the Sally Gearhart interview with photo. If it’s okay, I’d like to type it Sunday a.m. – as early as you open! Could someone let me know? Thanks.” My interview with Sally appears in the January 1980 off our backs.
Two of the best jobs I’ve ever had fell into my lap.[1] I wouldn’t have had the nerve to apply for either of them. Conventional wisdom for decades has held that women apply for jobs we’re sure we can do, while men apply for jobs they think they can learn to do. I fit the female stereotype, but my caution wasn’t just due to my sex. The message I internalized over the years from watching my perfectionist father ridicule my mother for getting her facts wrong was that it wasn’t safe to not have the right answer. It’s pretty much impossible to venture into new territory without making mistakes and asking questions that reveal that you don’t know everything. In addition, plenty of people were likely to write me off on the basis of my physical appearance, so I had to be hyper-qualified before I even thought of applying for anything.
In the spring of 1981, I quit my first editorial job (see “1979: I Become an Editor” for how I got that job and why I left) intending to take some time to focus on my writing. That’s not the way it worked out. About a month later, Mary Farmer, owner-manager of Lammas Bookstore, asked me to become the store’s book buyer. We were at my group house in Mount Pleasant prepping for my 30th birthday party; Mary was seeing one of my housemates at the time. I’d assigned her to halve cranberries for cranberry bread. The cranberries were squishy because, though I was already modestly renowned for my cranberry bread,[2] I hadn’t yet figured out that cranberries are much easier to cut in half if you freeze them first.
I’d bet good money that my face at the time didn’t show how astonished I was when Mary asked if I’d come work for her: Mary and Lammas were at the center of the D.C. women’s community, and I was way off on the peripheries somewhere. I had no idea she even knew who I was.
As it turned out, Lammas’s current buyer was leaving, and both she and Mary had noticed from my frequent forays into the store that not only was I an avid reader, but my tastes ran from history to feminist theory to poetry to fiction. Mary herself claimed not to be a reader, which wasn’t quite true, but she had her hands full as the regional music distributor for Ladyslipper. In addition to managing the store’s finances (enough in itself to bring on ulcers — read on!), she bought the records, jewelry, crafts, and cards. Wisely enough, she hired a co-worker to handle books and periodicals.[3]
How to convey how much that job changed my life? Let me try to re/count the ways.
The Lammas softball team on the cover of Willie Tyson’s Full Count (1974). Mary Farmer is 2nd from right in the back row, Willie is in the middle of that row with Ginny Berson (co-founder of Olivia Records) to her left and sound engineer Boden Sandstrom of Woman Sound at far left. I did not play softball but I did go to a bunch of games. (Cover photo by JEB.)
Back then I was at best dimly aware of how goods reached the shelves of retail outlets — which were all “brick and mortar” at the time, though we didn’t call them that because what else was there? I learned. When a title ran out, it had to be reordered. If it was new and/or selling briskly, it had to be reordered before the last copy sold.
There were two options: order from the publisher or from a distributor. When you ordered direct from the publisher, the discount was better — meaning we paid a smaller percentage of the retail price, which meant we got to keep more of the cash when the book was sold — but you had to order a larger quantity, possibly more than you could sell in several months. With a distributor it was possible to order two of this title and five of that. Distributors came in two flavors: those focusing on independent presses, including the feminist ones, and those who dealt with “the majors,” like Random House and Norton.[4]
Books, like other retail goods, have to be paid for before they sell, but you can’t sell a book that isn’t on the shelf. Most (all? virtually all?) feminist businesses were seriously undercapitalized. This meant that bills had to be paid out of revenue, and cash flow was always an issue. We couldn’t stock everything we wanted, but we had to stock what we needed, i.e., anything that was in demand and selling well.
Publishers’ invoices were supposed to be paid in 30 days. They virtually never got paid in 30 days, but when 60 days started stretching toward 90, you risked getting put on hold. If you were on hold with a publisher and needed one of its titles, you ordered from a distributor — and put that publisher on the priority to-be-paid list.
Lammas, at the beginning of August, is the cross-quarter day between the summer solstice and the fall equinox — and also Lammas Bookstore’s birthday. We celebrated every year with champagne and a sale. From left: Liz Snow of Ladyslipper Music, owner Mary Farmer (a Ladyslipper distributor), me, The Printer Tina Lunson, and staffer Deb Morris, who went on to Politics & Prose Bookstore in D.C. She’s wearing the 10th anniversary shirt, so this was probably 1983. I’ve got the old one on.
Feminist publishers were always on the priority to-be-paid list. They were in the same undercapitalized boat we were, except that their burden was even worse: the costs of publishing a book have to be paid up-front, and it can be six months after publication date before the income even starts to roll in. The independent distributors were next, particularly Inland Book Company. We couldn’t afford to be on hold with them. (See note 4 below for the why of this.)
What I learned in those days keeps coming up, most recently not long after the Covid-19 shutdown started, when huge gaps began to appear on grocery-store shelves that were usually crammed full. Supply chains, usually invisible to the consumer, were in the news. In April 2020, I blogged about them — and traced my awareness of their importance to my experience at Lammas.
Serendipitously the second Women in Print conference was held in suburban Maryland in October 1981, a few months after I’d started my new job.[5] As a writer, an activist, an amateur local historian, I already knew I was part of something far greater than myself. Seeing that “something greater” in the flesh, meeting women I’d only known from seeing their names in print and reading their words — well, it was something else. This neophyte bookseller couldn’t have asked for a better training program. At one plenary session I found myself sitting next to Adrienne Rich, who told me how much she’d liked a review of mine she’d just accepted for the lesbian journal Sinister Wisdom[6](of which she and her partner, Michelle Cliff, were then the editors).
At Women in Print I had a crash course in how it all fit together: publishers, bookstores, periodicals, print shops, designers, editors . . . The birth of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press was announced at that conference. It was historic in so many ways.
In my early months at Lammas I learned the details of ordering, stocking, interacting with customers, explaining the challenges of acquiring a title to women who were as clueless about the mechanics as I had been a few weeks earlier. For instance, in the early 1980s much work in feminist theory and history was published by university presses. Few university-press books were carried by any distributors, in large part because those presses only offered a 20% discount — which meant that for distributors there was no profit to be made whatsoever. Ordinarily, when a customer special-ordered a book, it was something we were out of temporarily and could restock on our next regular order. Not so with university-press books: in those cases I really had to order a single copy, knowing that between the short discount and the postage the store might actually lose money on the transaction.
For a regular customer I would do it, no question: I knew for certain that they’d return to pick up and pay for the book. For someone I’d never seen before, I learned to request a deposit on the retail price.
Over time I also learned to make a distinction between customers — and feminists in general — who understood the economics of running a small, economically fragile feminist business (or were willing to learn) and those who seemed to think we all lived in a utopian world where economic considerations did not apply. Mary, Lammas’s owner-manager, regularly ran into women who were surprised to find her doing her own laundry at the local laundromat. This often willful cluelessness was all too common in the women’s community, and 40 years later I keep running into it on Martha’s Vineyard too.[7] My patience with this crap left town a long time ago.
The 10th anniversary T from 1983. Our celebration concert (at All Souls Church, IIRC) featured pioneer Jewish lesbian singer-songwriter Maxine Feldman and local favorite Judy Reagan.
Meanwhile — well, I got to work in the heart of D.C.’s women’s community, which meant I got to meet and talk with so many women I wouldn’t have met otherwise. I knew just about everything that was going on, in town, in the book biz, and in the women’s music biz, across the country and even around the world, usually before most other people did. I got to talk continuously about books and call it work, because it was. I got to build up a women’s fantasy/science fiction collection; partly as a result, in 1984 I became Feminist Bookstore News’s first columnist, reviewing (you guessed it) fantasy and science fiction. This continued till 1996, long after I left D.C., and got me lots of free books.
The most lasting impact on me as a writer was the ongoing one-on-one contact with women to whom the printed word mattered. Books and articles opened new vistas for their readers, and the remarkable thing was that you couldn’t predict what book or story or newspaper article was going to make a decisive difference in someone’s life. And yes, I got to call customers’ attention to the works that had made a big difference in mine.
You’ll be hearing more about Lammas, the book biz, and why I eventually left town if you keep following this blog. I’m still trying to make sense of it all myself.
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notes
[1] The other was working for the Martha’s Vineyard Times, where I started as a part-time temp proofreader at the end of the decade. More about that later.
[2] My recipe came from Jean Stewart Wexler and Louise Tate King’s Martha’s Vineyard Cookbook, with minor modifications (less sugar, more orange juice). Forty years later I still make it regularly. That’s why a third of the space in the freezer of my small fridge is devoted to frozen cranberries. Cranberries are only available in the fall, so if you want cranberry bread year-round you stock up then and freeze them.
[3] The store was founded in 1973 by two lesbian jewelers as Lammas Women’s Shop. Feminist and lesbian books were scarce at that point, so they only occupied a shelf or two. That changed rapidly in the following years. IIRC Mary started off as their manager but within a year or two bought the store. The jewelers continued to make jewelry under the name Lielin, which was made up of syllables from their first names, LesLIE and LINda. I’m spacing their surnames but will probably rediscover or remember them in my (virtual) travels.
[4] In the early 1980s, the main trade distributors were Baker & Taylor and Ingram. The main indie-press distributors were Bookpeople and Inland Book Company. Since Bookpeople was on the West Coast and Inland was in Connecticut, freight charges were less from Inland, so I ordered more from them. Without getting down in the weeds about book pricing — all you have to know is that (1) books are heavy, (2) the bookstore pays the freight, and (3) since the retail price was generally printed on the book, a store couldn’t increase it to compensate for freight costs, not without being accused of ripping people off. By this time Women in Distribution (WinD), which specialized in feminist-press books, had folded, but Helaine Harris, one of WinD’s principals along with Cynthia Gair and Lee Schwing, was working for Daedalus, which dealt in books “remaindered” by the big trade publishers. Daedalus was based in nearby Maryland, so when a remaindered title was of interest to us (as often happened), Helaine would deliver it in person, saving us a bunch of money in freight charges. Helaine, incidentally, was a veteran of the Furies collective, as was Lee Schwing.
[6]Sinister Wisdom still exists. Not only is it still a journal of lesbian writing, it’s been publishing works that would otherwise get lost, such as The Complete Works of Pat Parker, edited by Julie R. Enszer, and Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker, 1974–1989. If this thrills you half as much as it does me, or even if you’re just curious, visit www.sinisterwisdom.org, email sinisterwisdom@gmail.com, or write Sinister Wisdom, 2333 Mcintosh Rd., Dover, FL 33527. P.S. I had work published in SW 14, 17, 28, and 35. I also know that “Sinister Wisdom” came from a line in Joanna Russ’s The Female Man. You see the challenge here? All it takes is a name to send me off on a dozen tangents, in part to remind me that my life really happened and that some of what I remember might be useful to others.
[7] More about that later. Much more. Remind me if I forget.
The T-Shirt Chronicles 