When opportunity knocks it's time to be out, open and occupied

I've been away. I don't know where I've been so it's probably best not to ask me. There aren't any photos to restore the memories. I've been in rather than out. Closed rather than open. Vacant instead of occupied.

But that's all about to change. Last Saturday I was in Bewdley for a slice of 'Poetry, Performance and Pizazz' with two rather wonderful performance poets - Emma Purshouse and Heather Wastie of Brewers' Troupe - and other talented workshop participants. And I realised the poet, performer, and perhaps more importantly, the person in me could be reawakened.

So tomorrow I'll be in Bewdley again, having been given the opportunity to read a couple of poems to folks in the streets alongside Emma. This is through the relationship Brewers' Troupe has formed with Bewdley Open Studios. More details on this weekend's readings can be found here.

So I'm back. And next time I'm away I may actually know where I am. Perhaps even where I'm going. First destination: Bewdley.

Stirring up the airwaves

An American adventure can quite change things. How do you like this outlook?

Gazing out to sea in Provincetown, Massachusetts:



Or this one?



That's right! You can now hear me in conversation with Merry Gangemi each week on Woman-Stirred Radio, offering commentaries on all things queer-shaped - mostly lesbian-shaped, I have to say - and mostly with a British spin. I'll also often be considering how our British and American cultures spin in and out of influencing each other.

Listen in each Thursday. Stream the whole show live 9pm-11pm in the UK (4pm-6pm Eastern US Time) from WGDR. There are always fantastic guests and great musical choices.

Actually, listen in next on 4th October. We're taking a break this week, but we'll be back!

Poetry Pleasures

Here is some of what I got up to on my recent visit to the US: reading at the Tea & Poetry event in East Hardwick, Vermont. That's Merry Gangemi giving me a warm welcome. We were to read in the garden at Perennial Pleasures, but it was cold outside that particular afternoon.

The whole trip was fantastic.

I'm treating this piece of video as a test. I hope more will follow, as well as more detail of my adventures.

Travels of a Queer Poet

Yes - that's me! I'm here, I'm queer, and I'm travelling to the States to read poetry and meet two of my Woman-Stirred friends in person for the very first time. I'm sure you've heard me talk about them before! So that really means I'm not here at all. In fact I'm over there - being queer, and friendly, and a poet. Or at least I will be very soon. If you see what I mean.

Here's what's going on. If you're in the Vermont vicinity, please come along and support us. I'm the one with the English accent.


BLACK SHEEP BOOKS presents:

Three Queer Poets:
Readings by Julie R. Enszer, Merry Gangemi, and Nicki Hastie

Tuesday, August 14 at 7:00 p.m.
at 4 Langdon Street, Montpelier, VT

Julie R. Enszer, a Maryland-based writer and lesbian activist, is published in "Iris: A Journal about Women," "Room of One's Own," "Long Shot," the "Jewish Women's Literary Annual," and the "Harrington Lesbian Literary Quarterly." Her book, "Homesteading: Essays on Life, Death, Sex, and Liberation," is forthcoming in winter 2008. For more on Julie, see http://www.JulieREnszer.com.

Merry Gangemi lives in Woodbury, VT, and is the host of Woman-Stirred Radio, a weekly queer cultural journal on WGDR 91.1 fm. Her work is published in the "Paterson Literary Review," "Journal of NJ Poets," "Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly," the "Harrington Lesbian Literary Review," "Vermont Woman," and the "Hardwick Gazette." She produces the annual Tea & Poetry series, a Vermont literary festival now in its sixth year. For more on Merry, see http://www.merrygangemi.org.

Nicki Hastie lives in Nottingham, England. She is a founding member of the Woman-Stirred blog. Her work is published in "Chroma," "Diva," "Trouble & Strife," and also in critical anthologies relating to women's health, coming out stories, lesbian fiction, and representations of lesbians in popular culture. For more on Nicki, see http://www.nickihastie.demon.co.uk.

* * *

Black Sheep Books, a community space and bookstore in Montpelier, Vermont, offers affordable radical and scholarly books, and hosts educational events on cultural and political topics. As an all-volunteer project, we are operated by a five-member collective hand in hand with a group of dedicated volunteers. Our principle focus is to provide access to anti-authoritarian Left ideas in a way that promotes intellectual debate and challenges today’s hegemonic culture. Together with horizontalist social movements and political projects, bookstores, infoshops, and publishers, Black Sheep Books works toward an egalitarian, ecological, and nonhierarchical society.

Black Sheep Books
4 Langdon Street, Montpelier, Vermont
www.blacksheepbooks.org / 802-225-8906
Hours: Tues-Sat 11-6, Sun 11-5, Mon closed



And then, on Saturday 18 August, what better than Tea and Poetry?

You really won't want to miss us in the gardens of Perennial Pleasures for this Vermont literary festival, now in its sixth year thanks to the organisational skills and poetic-mindedness of Merry Gangemi. Voluntary donations benefit the AFSC VT office youth outreach and education program.

Readings are at 1pm and 3pm on both Saturday and Sunday. Julie, Merry, and I will be reading on Saturday at 3pm. Don't forget to bring a lawn chair!

Window seat in standard class

I was in London today. Getting there by train, I had these thoughts.

Not Blue

The pen is black.
If blue I might
have needed to stop
in order to decide
whether to continue.
I could have been
wrongly poised,
paper averse.
For now,
the day is saved.


London-bound

Windows are for looking out and through,
but harsh train lights present my twin,
hovering over opposite tracks.
It's impossible not to see -
half-turned in acknowledgement -
dark circles under eyes,
pores like newsprint dots.
I would not choose this early start.
Beyond me sheep have woken to rain,
resisting dampness beneath railroad arches.
Creatures waiting to emerge from shadows.


Turn-Ups

Yesterday I caught a leaf
in my trouser turn-up.
Was it there all afternoon?
Or did it drop later with the rain?
Carried home in a thoughtful haze,
showing me how to attend to the world.
I scooped it out, a yellow veined disc,
embarrassed what else might have
been not-quite-concealed as we talked.
Crumbs from my lunchtime sandwich?
A crisp from the lunchtime before?
Once I found a paperclip.
I think I can be forgiven one small leaf.
Leaves will fall where they please.

Productively me

You know, I'm enjoying a really positive weekend. This is how weekends should be. Engaging and productive. I'm reminded how powerful I can be. Other people help that along. I mean, where's the point in being powerful all on my own? It only develops significance when it leads to stronger connections and communications.

I won't go into all the details. But there are a number of personal revelations that have come to the fore this week, and I'm determined to do my best with them. That's number one. On top of that, the holiday plans to meet up with my Woman-Stirred friends are moving along very nicely. This is really going to happen! America, here I come!! And today I was contacted by Mel over at everette_1's journal, who told me she found meaning and motivation in my website words. How about that?

Thanks for getting in touch, Mel. And for inspiring me to do this quiz.

You Are 60% Boyish and 40% Girlish

You are pretty evenly split down the middle - a total eunuch. Okay, kidding about the eunuch part. But you do get along with both sexes. You reject traditional gender roles. However, you don't actively fight them. You're just you. You don't try to be what people expect you to be.

How Boyish or Girlish Are You?

That's not too much of a surprise, is it? It's interesting, though, that I take great pride in coming out slightly more boyish than girlish. I really don't want to do girls down. I love girls. I guess it's just that I love boyish girls and those girls who reject traditional gender roles most of all. Haven't I always known that! Stereotypes, away with you!!

Where has all the summer gone?

I've put my arms and legs away for a bit, folding them carefully inside artificial coverings. But hopefully not for long. What is going on? I even put the heating on temporarily last night. This is not the summer that sweltering July led us to expect. It could all be for the best if the next heatwave is saved until the very end of August, and preferably the beginning of September. For those two weeks will serve as my real summer holiday this year.

We're off to Brighton again in September. Four nights instead of last year's three! And a more expensive B&B. Not that there was anything wrong with last year's choice. It was perfectly pleasant. The good news is we'll be there in time to take in the latest sand sculpture festival on a Roman theme.

I think you could call us late-season holiday-makers. It has its advantages. The sun will shine as soon as the kids are back to school, you just wait.

Fantasy Fortunes

I downloaded my WeeMee from Friends Reunited to my mobile phone recently. So I've decided my
alter-ego deserves to have a few adventures - to get out there and see some of the world, some of the places I've seen and possibly others I haven't. The Grand Canyon is top of the list of places already visited.

It's lucky I'd thought ahead and provided a feline companion to ensure my WeeMee traveller isn't too lonely out there. It's also a form of dedication to Bradley, a lovely grey cat who adopted this house as his home and decided to share the best years of his life with us. He sadly departed this world in January 2004.

Actually, the cat friends on Friends Reunited only come in grey. The owners (soon to be ITV, as announced just last week, I'm so up on my dot com current affairs!) might want to consider a new feature - "Select and colour a pet". But at least I'm happy with this one colour choice. Bradley will never let my WeeMee down.

Where shall I send WeeMee next? It could be like the National Lottery Jet Set. Keep living the luxury lifestyle for as long as you can in a new location each week. Without Eamonn Holmes, of course - which is maybe not a bad thing. Living a life of fantasy, on the other hand, can be a good thing. Especially when you feel you've been chained to a desk for the past few months and know you're not going to travel anywhere too soon.

My head is freshly shaved today. It's the least I could do knowing that Curtis Bickham over at Head-Liner.com has just this week reproduced my essay - A Woman Shaved: a sign of what? - in his latest online volume of head-shaving stories. It's a volume all about women, too.

Sand! In Brighton?

You can find the most ordinary substances in the most unexpected places. Brighton is renowned for its pebbles, so there's a wonderful irony in staging the world's largest sand sculpture festival in a beach resort which boasts no sand. The sand was imported from Holland. Holland is a little closer than Egypt and, apparently, has exactly the right kind of river sand for building tall sculptures.

I didn't even know the festival was on, so it was a treat to find ourselves in Brighton in time to take it in. I love sand but Brighton wouldn't be Brighton without its pebbly beach. I'm happy with a pebble in hand, although it was Andrea who attempted the stone-skimming into the sea. I sat and watched. Pebbles mould themselves very well to a bottom and are surprisingly comfortable. Unlike sand, pebbles aren't that adept at creeping into every kind of crease and crevice; they find it hard to be inconspicuous. Don't knock a pebble, you'll likely come off worse.

Ok - so enough about pebbles and what about the lesbian gaze? I thought there might be interest in that topic. I've prepared a sonnet.


Beach Front

I’m back from Brighton where the pebbles rush
to greet the sea with tuneful chattering.
As water softens rugged stone, a hush
swells from their tranquil sighs, imagining
a future forming sand. A train declares
the journey to Black Rock. This faster route
to sandy parts erases time and bears
us to Egyptian feast - an absolute
array of hieroglyphics, pyramids
and mythic beasts. I build a fantasy
of girls at play on Sussex beach, eyelids
held low against the glare, their gaze on me,
or mine on them. In strong light who can tell?
A glimpse of breast? I bend to take a shell.

© 2005 Nicki Hastie


The weather was fantastic, the long shorts enjoyed their outing, and these breasts and that cheeky tongue deserved more than a second glance.

Out on a Brighton dike

Today I'm sorting out my best clothes ready to venture into that other British gay coastal resort beginning with B. The one that isn't Blackpool. That would be Brighton, then. The number one (it has to be said) British gay coastal resort beginning with B.

This is the last chance for a summer holiday this year so I'm packing my long shorts and my short longs. I have both, lucky me. I also have long longs, just in case the sun is cloud-logged. The only item I don't possess are short shorts. A few years ago I used to play tennis in short shorts, but as I don't play tennis any more I can safely do away with anything so unflattering. Give me shorts on the baggy side with multiple pockets and I'm ready for adventure. Long shorts measure in at knee length or just above the knee. Short longs are three-quarter length trousers reaching to the calves. That's as precise as I'm willing to be.

The Brighton-Nottingham link has turned up in other ways today. I love being able to form connections in memory and language. There's usually a book involved in this somewhere. The written word is a helpful prompt to memory, of course. There's even more joy when that book is on my shelves. My Woman-Stirred collaborator, Mary, has been talking to me about lesbian literary Paris in the first half of the twentieth century, including the lesbian gaze of American journalist, Janet Flanner. So of course I can't resist the wordplay leap from Flanner to flâneur, also strongly linked with Paris and a significant figure in the 1920s Paris salon culture represented by such writers as Djuna Barnes.

For writing on the lesbian flâneur, you can't do better than turn to Sally Munt. That would be Professor Sally Munt, author of Heroic Desire: Lesbian Identity and Cultural Space, amongst other things. This is the book I remembered to look out and which rests in my lap as I type. Our paths never crossed, but I get the feeling Sally didn't enjoy life as much in Nottingham, so it's good news for her that she found her way back to Brighton and the University of Sussex. In the move from Brighton to Nottingham in 1993 she wrote in her essay, "The Lesbian Flâneur", "in terms of my lesbian identity, I'm in another country [in Nottingham]".

Nottingham has been getting a lot of undeserved bad press recently, so I hardly dare add further fuel to the suggestion that there are many English cities preferable to Nottingham. For a holiday, especially if you like the sea, maybe. Let me just state now that I'm a very happy Nottingham resident and Nottingham has its own culture to be proud of. Still, Munt has some interesting observations worth quoting and (written over 10 ten years ago) these have absolutely nothing to do with the current furore over English city league tables.

Brighton looks to Europe for its model of Bohemia, for it is just warm enough to provide a pavement culture to sit out and watch the girls go by. ... Promenading on a Sunday afternoon on the pier, loitering in The Lanes, or taking a long coffee on the seafront, ostensibly reading The Observer, the gaze is gay. Brighton introduced me to the dyke stare, it gave me permission to stare. It made me feel I was worth staring at, and I learned to dress for the occasion. Brighton constructed my lesbian identity, one that was given to me by the glance of others, exchanged by the looks I gave them, passing - or not passing - in the street.

It's colder in Nottingham. There's nothing like being contained in its two large shopping malls on a Saturday morning to make one feel queer. Inside again, this pseudo-public space is sexualized as privately heterosexual. Displays of intimacy over the purchase of family-sized commodities are exchanges of gazes calculated to exclude. When the gaze turns, its intent is hostile: visual and verbal harassment make me avert my eyes. I don't loiter, ever, the surveillance is turned upon myself, as the panopticon imposes self-vigilance. One night last week, I asked two straight women to walk me from the cinema to my car. The humiliation comes in acknowledging that my butch drag is not leather enough to hide my fear.

Sally Munt, The Lesbian Flâneur in Heroic Desire: Lesbian Identity and Cultural Space (London: Cassell, 1998), pp.31-32.

It's really not that unsafe in Nottingham, I assure you. We just can't claim to be a gay city with a capital B. I guess this explains why I'm taking care over my wardrobe for Brighton. Not only is the weather (hopefully) warmer, I also have to be ready to acknowledge my position in the dyke stare. To be seen and known. To watch and recognise.

Hmmm, it seems my Brighton wardrobe is pretty much identical to my Nottingham wardrobe, with perhaps a little added emphasis on the shorts. Munt's point exactly, wouldn't you say? Going out on a dike is all about receiving appreciation for the effort. It's worth those hours at the ironing board when the population is stacked in your favour. It's not that the gaze in Nottingham is hostile; perhaps it just isn't always sure what it's looking at.

There's a further plus to getting away to a different city with an acknowledged gay scene - and that's the anonymity of the lesbian gaze. It's a small world - but if you're lucky - not that small. After all, the four hour drive from Nottingham to Brighton, this takes me to another country - right?