Up From the Archives: Talking with Roberto Bedoya

The dominant US ideology of Whiteness had policies that made me invisible which I challenged, still do.
                                          -- Roberto Bedoya















In September and October of 2008, I had the pleasure of interviewing Roberto Bedoya, writer, activist, arts administrator, curator for the reading series at Intersection for the Arts in the 1980s, and so much more!

You can find the interview here:

Outside is the Side I Take: Part One
http://xpoetics.blogspot.com/2008/10/outside-is-side-i-take-interview-with.html


Doing Civic: Part Two
http://xpoetics.blogspot.com/2008/10/doing-civic-part-2-interview-with.html


Roberto Bedoya is the Executive Director of the Tucson Pima Arts Council. He is also a writer and arts consultant who works in the area of support systems for artists. As an arts consultant he has worked on projects for the Creative Capital Foundation and the Arizona Commission on the Arts (Creative Capital№s State Research Project); The Ford Foundation (Mapping Native American Cultural Policy); The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations (Creative Practice in the 21st Century); and The Urban Institute (Investing in Creativity: A Study of the Support Structure for US Artists and the Arts and Culture Indicators in Community Building Project). He is the author of the monograph U.S. Cultural Policy: Its Politics of Participation, Its Creative Potential (www.npnweb.org <http://www.npnweb.org/> ). He is the former Executive Director of the National Association of Artists№ Organizations (NAAO) a national arts service organization for individual artists and artist-centered organizations, primarily visual and interdisciplinary organizations. NAAO was a co-plaintiff in the Finley vs. NEA lawsuit. Bedoya has been a Rockefeller Fellow at New York University and a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.

Words in the Mouth: Camille Roy interviewed by Robin Tremblay-McGaw in Poetry Flash 1991



Cover of Roy's Cold Heaven with Gina Hyams as Fear
and Dey Ehrlich as Technique from Bye, Bye Brunilde




In honor of Camille's new book Sherwood Forest, I thought I would reprise this interview with Camille, Gina Hyams who played Fear in Roy's play Bye Bye Brunhilde, and director Zack. For some reason that day, Dey Ehrlich was not able to be there. This was the first interview I ever did and I remember it clearly because we did the whole interview and then I discovered that something was wrong with the cassette recorder (yes, I said the cassette recorder!) or rather, my operation of it, so we had to do the interview all over again! It was alarming and fun.






Words in the Mouth: A New Look at Poet's Theater

ROBIN TREMBLAY-McGAW
published in Poetry Flash  August 1991


BYE BYE BRUNHILDE is an original Poet's Theater performance written by poet/playwright Camille Roy, directed by Zack, designed by Rodney O'Neal Austin and Robert Hold and performed by Gina Hyams and Dey Ehrlich, originally co-presented by The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University and New Langton Arts in March 1991. The play will run at the Studio at Theater Rhinoceros, San Francisco, August 15-25.


There is an active. fruitful, difference of opinion in the air which has encouraged many of us to take another look at the possibilities of poetry in performance; that is, theater used as a vehicle for poetics and language theory, as written by poets, not playwrights, usually practiced by poets unconcerned with narrative conflict and action, the traditional values of theater. The play becomes a setting for language, instead of a vehicle for plot. Literature and theate, as we are used to thinking of them, are based on a dialectic, and don't necessarily reduce to one voice. But experimental Poet's Theater has challenged these viewpoints, blurred the borders, as demonstrated by poet/playwright Camille Roy's Bye Bye Brunhilde, a play about two lesbians who share an apartment and have a 'non-representational' tug of war between "identity politics and language theory" as they act out their "tender dance and brutal wrestling match. As Robert Gluck, poet and writer, has said,

"Bye Bye Brunhilde is a gorgeously perverse valentine about two dykes, Fear and Technique.



Fear says. "We're compatible in a way. I like you and you like my looks.' Technique replies. "You're right. I do like your looks. Camille Roy has put a lesbian spin on poet's theatre. Her characters entirely embody their sexual give and take while, on another level, their roles are dismantled by star-struck language."

Bye Bye Brunhilde premiered to sold out houses earlier this year, and returns to the stage in August with the original cast, Dey Ehrlich and Gina Hyams. Camille Roy has published poems and stories in ZYZZYV A and (HOW)ever; her work has appeared in anthologies such as Women On Women and Deep Down; her first book is forthcoming from Kelsey Street Press. She is also editor of Dear World, a "queer art & lit magazine." Bye Bye Brunhilde grew out of a collaboration with film and video maker Abigail Child on "pornography, narrative, and community” in a lesbian context. ..

- Joyce Jenkins, Editor, Poetry Flash



The following talk was conducted by Robin Tremblay-McGaw with Camille Roy, Gina Hyams, and Zack.



RTM: Who are the writers that interest you, Camille?

CR: In this play, I think my two reference points were the plays of Carla Harryman and Frank O'Hara. They are both writers that I really admire; they're very different, vivid in different ways as well as both being poets writing for the theater. Other writers that I've been influenced by include Robert Gluck and Kathleen Fraser. I've been influenced by both poets and narrative writers quite a lot. So I've had to reconcile those diverse influences in my own work. Writing for voices, writing for theater, is one way to do that, to combine narrative and highly charged language. I can have the freedom and flexibility that I want and still keep these elements of recognition with an audience that creates a kind of intimacy that is valuable to me.

RTM: Zack and Gina, what do you see as different, if anything, in the work that poets produce for theater in comparison to what other writers produce?

Z: I think the clearest difference is the amount of steps you, as a director, need to go through to have a feel for the script or text. In most plays the analysis is pretty limited to the motivations and the psychological behavior and how that's manifested through the actions of the characters, whereas all those kinds of modes of interpretation go out the window when you're looking at a script that's abstract or convoluted or, at times, even nonsensical. You cannot break this script down according to the 'rules' of traditional drama. That's one big difference. Another difference is that it's not always clear from the words what should or could be happening visually. The words do not point to definitive stage action. They may suggest something, but there is no one-on-one relationship. Ten different directors will give you ten very different Bye Bye Brunhilde.

GH: Right. When we were starting, when we first rehearsed it, Zack and Dey and I sat in a cafe. Our first impulse was to try to pin it down in some way. What does this line mean? What do these characters mean? We found that that's not a helpful way to deal with this language because the language leaps all over the place. And that's the joy in the language, that you can go all these different places.

Z: Sometimes there's subtext and sometimes—there isn't—and to jump on the assumption that there's always subtext can be misleading. Or to throw subtext out the window can also be a faux pas. In traditional plays, generally, there is a lot of subtext, but it's of a simple nature. The character says, "I want you to leave!" when they really want you to stay. But in a play like this the character says, "Milk-white pebble stone'" and maybe it's not productive to spend half an hour saying "What are those milk-white pebbles there?"

GH: Except that as performers we needed to find those moment-to-moment kinds of truths and meaning. There is an arc to the play, but there's not a linear progression in the play that is immediately discernible. It's a much more intuitive progression that happens in the imagination of these characters.

CR: This play is kind of a meeting point for a set of collaborations that began in a collaboration, and it took in other collaborations as it moved to the stage of being performed in a theater. That was very exciting for me as a writer. The way the play was actually written invited collaboration, and I think it also invites that from the audience.

Z: Oh. definitely! I think that most plays, when they reach the stage of production, have been refined to the point of being almost fascistic in the sense of one vision, one clear, digestible, easily and quickly understood unit or moment or statement or message, or something. This play requires a lot from the audience in terms of interpretation. They must go through the same thing: do I want to spend thirty minutes looking at the milk-white pebbles, or do I want to go on and find out what's going on with the relationship?

RTM: So it's very process-oriented for everyone involved right from the very beginning?

Z: Yes, and I think that can make certain audience members uncomfortable, to realize that they have a responsibility or... an opportunity to participate in this way and invent along with us –that it is not a sealed, closed system that they are watching as if it sits under glass existing outside of them. They are really in the moment with the performers as well as the characters, as well as the writer. It's all [being worked on] at the same time rather than being something that has been finished and made, and now just needs to be consumed.

RTM: Well, who is the audience for this?

CR: I think that this play is in many ways quite recognizable by people who are not necessarily experimental writers, although experimental writers get every line, and often other audience, members do not.

GH: It's not that they get every line. They get something else. They may not care about these narrative arguments at all and have no interest in literary theories. But it really doesn't matter with this play because these characters, these entities are so physical and sensual, and they do have a relationship to each other and to the space and to the audience and to the language—which is almost a third character. It's funny; and there's a lot of story without a lot of plot.

CR: There's story, and there's character, but there's not narrative in the traditional form. The character and the stories are there because they give a certain kind of pleasure, and not there because they're part of an organization that's desired to reproduce somebody's idea of what reality is. It's much more open-ended than that.

RTM: It's interesting that it's such a pleasurable piece. How do you see the lesbianism of the characters relating to the play?

CR: It's that intimacy theme again. The lesbian community is a sort of hothouse for intimacy, as any group that is all women can be. Possibly the private life of couples is played out a bit more in front of friends and others than in the straight community.

Also Fear and Technique have very different views of sexual identity, that is, their identity as lesbians. To Fear it is a riddle that undoes itself. For Technique it is a lyrical expression of a kind of logic. Fear is more innovative, really, because she's not only lesbian, she's femme. This is a location with more than one source of knowledge.

Also, sexuality. Their sexual relationship is metaphorically realized in the play. The context for this is the explosion in play and discourse concerning sex in the lesbian community over the last twelve years. It's almost a kind of community cannibalism, feasting off the body.

RTM: But this was an intellectual idea before it became these characters in the language that they're aspiring to.

CR: That's true, but I was also wanting to look at the intersection of theory and sexuality, theory and relationship; to look at story and character to see what kind of pleasure they can give.

Z: I think you've also jumbled the balance which most people are used to in the theater, in terms of how much they are feeling with the characters or for the characters, and how much they have to think about how this piece is being made, or what are the conscious steps we go through when we assemble experience, for example. The audience has to put those words together with those images, and they might not necessarily fit or be as clear as what we encounter in our daily life; I mean, that's if you don't have any imagination.

RTM: There is a deep sense of recognition, though, in this piece for the audience members. What is it that the audience is identifying with?

CR: I think this is a very intimate relationship and the characters have a strong presence. It's not an experimental piece in the sense that there is no character. Some of the dynamics of intimacy are what people recognize. They recognize the misunderstandings, the lying interpretations of reality, and the comedy of that.

Let me put in something here about writing the dialogue. That, to me, was just like an explosion, it was so much fun, and provided a whole new set of directions: to imagine the 'words in the mouth' rather than on the page, and part of that was being willing to eliminate descriptive writing. When you're doing dialogue a lot of descriptive setup just gets dropped, and that means that you have a certain kind of multiplicity; you have many perspectives rather than one; you have constant relationships rather than a solidified view of the world. That was tremendously exciting to explore—It's still exciting. There's a way that images in writing function to contain desire, to turn it into something static. If you take that out, then you have this interesting field of possibility that's very physical.

RTM: There isn't an imposed authority or particular view. As you're saying, this validates all perspectives.

Z: There's no omniscience.

CR: Right, and what you have instead is this complex relationship which is like a system rather than a point of view. It also has a kind of organic body of its own. It parallels what Gina was saying - the language is a third character.

RTM: If your experience is that there is not an omniscient point of view, that there isn't a single consciousness or 'correct' or single personality, then does that change the form of your writing?

CR: I think that it's a simplification to try to reduce everything to one voice. It's understandable that people would attempt to do that, but I don't think that it's very accurate. When you have groups of people - a couple or any group - that are relating together, there are certain patterns that they have that are part of, not each one individually, but of their relationship as a complex whole. That's the level of reality that this play is working with. The more traditional view is that there is an objective point of view that can describe what's going on that's outside of those dynamics.

GH: There's no outside in this play.

Z: Very confusing! What you are saying here is, this conflict between the two characters is not a resolvable one, and what one character may consider a resolution won't be for the other one. I think that's much more realistic than the traditional way we approach drama - what happens to the conflicts, who gets what in the end, and blah blah blah. In a way, it's open-ended; the only possible conclusion can be some kind of balance which includes both kinds of realities.

RTM: There are irreconcilable differences that you live with.

Z: Right. Something that would happen frequently when Camille and I first started talking about the script would be: I would pose a question and say, "Well, is it this or is it this'!" and she would say, “Well, it's both," and I would say, “Uh, huh, okay." There was a lot of me trying to make sense of things. It became clear that this was not the kind of world where anything goes, but the kind of world that could assimilate different points of view simultaneously and different realities simultaneously. There was a lot of work for me at the beginning about distinguishing points of view because there was the possibility that it was objective reality, or that it was in Fear's mind or just the way Technique saw what was happening. There's a lot of shifting going on, and it's not all clear. Sometimes it's clear to the audience through lighting or something, but even then many of these people don't get it. There's a lot of shifting, and the play is exciting that way.

RTM: Fear has a very powerful imagination.

Z: And inspires us, too. I think the beauty of that character is that we can go with her and not question things the way we might if we encountered her on the street—where we might think, “This woman's out there!"

But in the theater we can enter her.

RTM: Would you say that she is poetry, and Technique is more prose in style?

CR: That's an interesting point of view. I think that Fear and Technique tell different kinds of stories, that Technique tells stories that are not like Fear's. She constructs explanations. But when you see her operate you realize that a lot of what prompts her to do that is her imagination; Fear is driven by her imagination. So in this play one can't say that Technique is the more realistic character. One thing that's revealed about her over the course of the play is how she fails to really get the control that she wants to have through her theories, and so there's an equality in her relationship to Fear that you might not think would be there in the beginning.

Z: It's very interesting: what's set up as given at the beginning is pulled totally into question by the end of the play, in terms of the characters. But I also think that each of them are poetry by themselves in their own self-worlds, but in encountering each other, in seeing each other, they see prose.

GH: As a performer encountering Fear, it was very important that I understand her as poetry and not as a character who grew up in the suburbs and who had ten brothers. The play gives little hints in fits and starts about what her past could have been or was in her mind. But there's a fluidity that poetry can have and that Fear is.

Z: I think Fear is who we all want to be, in the sense she is someone who has taken creation to the max, which we're so conditioned to be afraid of. But she is really in the moment and is willing to follow her mind.

GH: And her body.

Z: . . . and her body, right, in a way that can be very alarming to people who are looking for logic. Because we're so trained to look for that logic and use it to understand what is happening: point A goes to point B. So it can be threatening or disconcerting to see someone who is not connecting the dots.

GH: Well, I think some people get scared for her too.

CR: I think that's primary, that people get scared for her, but they also feel very attracted to her. She is really an attractive character in the play.

RTM: I think one recognizes oneself, sort of .the dark-self, the self of excess, in Fear. She articulates things that to the rest of us, as you say, are a little bit dangerous. She wants an enemy, and she says that she wants one. I find that interesting.

CR: Another paradox is that, in some way, because she's been overcome by the world, she's more in and of the world than are other people who are more 'competent'. Somehow she's not just in touch with what's going on, she is what's going on.

GH: Well, I find it actually liberating and wonderful to be her because she is very different than I am in many ways. Fear tells stories differently.

RTM: What do you mean she tells stories differently?

GH: Well, before I was Fear, I felt in some ways awkward telling stories. I'd feel as if I was either taking up too much room in telling a long narrative story about my past or feel like I had to know someone very, very well before I would reveal in that way. Fear takes up all kinds of space with her language. What gives her the most pleasure in the world is to see where her stories take her, both in her own mind and in her speech and in her adventures.

RTM: One of the things that interests me, speaking about space, is the kind of space someone takes up in language. That seems to be a particular issue, I think, for women more than men.

CR: That's an interesting point. I think that the kind of space that Fear takes up is somehow very feminine. She tells a story full of power and experience; we tend to think that feminine stories will not have those qualities.

RTM: And that they should not take up so much space. I think that men are allowed more space than women when it comes to speaking and the kinds of space that they take up in that way.

CR: Technique, in a way, in being theoretical, has some resemblance to the way men take up story space, and yet what becomes of her character is very different than what you would expect, given that. There's a surprise there that I won't give away. The way those two things playoff of one another is interesting, too.

RTM: What hasn't been done in theater that you would like to see done? What kinds of things would you like to exploit or work with yourself?

CR: I'm tremendously interested in the mind of multiplicity that's available and the conflict that you get from having different voices without a single narrator in the background who is basically setting everything up. The other thing is that, when I'm writing, I feel that I'm writing for the mouth rather than for the page, and that really makes the process of writing more physical for me and also I feel that more of my body is involved even though less of my body is described. It's an interesting contradiction; it's something that I like a lot. I think that when you have live performance, you have a lot of leeway to be very experimental with the language and not lose your audience because you have the characters on stage who give all the physical clues. To me that's an opportunity to really go someplace different in terms of the writing.

RTM: It requires the audience to come in with an open mind, without expectations.

Z: I wouldn't say that—because you're not going to get one coming in without expectations, but I think the play gives the audience credit for being able to take in something that might not be immediately consumable. It is so often the case nowadays that people think they can understand something in a split second; whereas this requires a little more processing; I find this kind of art pleasurable.

CR: It involves letting go of understanding every little thing as a goal.

Z: Or putting them together in that way, "If I miss this piece, then I won't get the next piece."

CR: Right, this is a piece where you can miss one thing and get another thing and get another thing and miss something, and that's really fine. There's no sense that you're excluded as an audience member because of that. For some members of the audience, it takes them about halfway through the show before they really realize that that's how it's going to be. At that point I noticed, particularly on one night, they just opened up; they just all got a lot looser.

RTM: So, the play sort of shatters, then, the hierarchy of meaning?

CR: Well, what is the hierarchy of meaning? [laughter]

Z: That's the whole point.

GH: It's definitional.

CR: It shatters the idea that there's one right answer.



You can read a recent a 2008 interview with Gina Hyams published previously on this blog  here. Among other things, Gina discusses Fear's blood red  velvet spandex mini dress!

Beverly Dahlen Interview: Part Two

Dahlen reading in New York. Photo by Erica Kaufman.

"Thrilling to Throw One's Voice Out There"
Part Two: An Interview With Beverly Dahlen Conducted in October 2009 via email.

A native of Portland, Oregon, Beverly Dahlen has lived in San Francisco for many years. Her first book, Out of the Third, was published by Momo’s Press in 1974. Two chapbooks, A Letter at Easter (Effie’s Press, 1976) and The Egyptian Poems (Hipparchia Press, 1983) were followed by the publication of the first volume of A Reading in 1985 (A Reading 1—7, Momo’s Press). Since then, three more volumes of A Reading have appeared. Chax Press published A Reading 8—10 (1992); Potes and Poets Press: A Reading 11—17 (1989); Instance Press: A Reading 18—20 (2006). Chax Press also published the chapbook A-reading Spicer & Eighteen Sonnets in 2004. Ms. Dahlen has published work in numerous periodicals and anthologies. Her essay on beauty and her poem called “A Reading…. the Beautiful” were published in Crayon 5.

RTM: What about writing and its address,the address to the other. You write: "the reading of the writing goes on, this is for you because you are not here. you are always not here. you are never here. I make you up, I wonder how you look. and now it is so much easier to write than to speak. an other is so much an hallucination it's scary. I don't know what I speak to." (A Reading 1-7 78) In A Reading 11-17 you write: “ a dead ear, who might be out there listening to this. whoever you are. Foiled” (51). I’m interested in your conception of address in your writing Beverly. What is your work’s relation to its possible or imagined readers?
*
BD: That first passage is addressed to Rachel Blau duPlessis. We are friends but we rarely see one another. Our friendship is carried on by correspondence and sharing of poetry. It's a kind of lament because the other is absent. And we do invent images of absent others---they become a kind of "hallucination." The other passage is just imagining an audience, or a reader, that unknown other, someone who might be there----or perhaps there is no one listening, nothing, then one is "foiled."
*
RTM: In 1988 the Socialist Review published Ron Silliman’s “Poetry and the Politics of the Subject.” In it, Silliman introduces a selection of work by various poets. The poets introduced are: Aaron Shurin, Juan Felipe Herrera, Lisa Bernstein, Leslie Scalapino, Bob Perelman, Beverly Dahlen, Nathaniel Mackey, and Carol Dorf. About these eight poets, Silliman wrote: “These poets are different precisely because their audiences are not identical and thus have different needs” (68). Silliman situates these writers as having different audiences and readers while also positing that for some, their relationship to literary experimentation particularly vis-à-vis formal innovations and the construction or deconstruction of the subject is “more conventional.” He does this by setting up a dichotomy between the “subjects of history” who are largely white, heterosexual males and others who have been history’s objects–women, people of color, sexual minorities, etc. You were one of the poets Silliman presented in this selection. What was your response to this presentation of your work at the time and what are your thoughts about this construction of various poetries and modes of investigation now?
*
BD: I think you've asked me about this before. It's a long time since I've read the article and I can't now find my copy of it. I do think it's one way to proceed with an investigation, surely, though of course there are others. But I can't comment further. Speaking of Silliman, I don't think I've made clear how much I like and admire his work. He did an absolutely heroic reading of Ketjak at the corner of Powell and Market---his throat was bleeding by the end---and Tjanting was read by a group of us standing on a bridge above the trains in the Muni underground at the Church Street station. It was thrilling to throw one's voice out there into that roaring site. The idea of poetry against all that raw noise was somehow exhilarating. It was a wonderful defiant demonstration.
*

RTM: Beverly---Note: here is your response from an email to me from 5-21-08. I attach it here in case you want to work with this as well.

Note: Beverly agreed to include this May 21, 2008 response here in this interview. It follows.
*
BD: I suppose I read the Silliman article you quote from, but that was a long time ago and I can't remember much about it now. The particular passage you select for my comment seems familiar, as I re-read it, and problematic because the bias against narrative, lyric, etc. among certain language poets was well-known. I don't mean to generalize here, as I think Ron was doing to an extent that makes the statement inaccurate and misleading. And I frankly don't see that it has much to do with my work, since I have been identified as a woman, as a feminist, but certainly not as a writer of narrative. (I sometimes wish I could write a straight narrative.)

The way the statement is framed clearly privileges some poets as "progressive"--that is, those who explode the literary conventions--and some as those not quite progressive? who are obliged to tell their stories. So story-telling is denigrated as a kind of lower level of development. I thought then (as I do now) that this dismisses the brilliant re-inventions of self in the work of the "new narrative" writers I knew, but beyond the local scene, I felt that we were just beginning to discover the work of writers like HD and Dorothy Richardson, and many others of a previous generation. HD (as novelist) hardly wrote simplistic "stories." Of the novels I remember reading at the time (HD's of course, but also Richardson, Woolf, Mary Butts) "story" seems the least important element.

These works, of course, have been marginalized, and the more relevant question is why?

I note, maybe not so incidentally, that Ron refers to something called "the narrative of history." It's a peculiar choice of metaphor in this context, reifying history (History?) as one long ongoing story. It seems awfully conventional: the sort of thing you saw in old movies where the pages of the book (history?) would appear on screen as the events progressed. And progress. What is that?

This is all I can write today. I'll keep thinking about it.
*

RTM: I've just been reading a really interesting article by Ben Friedlander on Emily Dickinson called "Emily Dickinson and the Battle of Ball's Bluff" in the recent issue of PMLA.



Ben explores the complex exploration of war that Dickinson's poetry reveals. He writes,

"Scholars must begin to take account of the fact that Dickinson's wartime writing encompasses multiple, contradictory forms of response, a diversity of representational strategies and of the attitudes expressed that strongly suggests a project of coming to terms with war, a project in which the war provided both a constraining pressure on the imagination and an opportunity for exercising it. This alternative account assumes that Dickinson expressed in her poems what she was willing and able to say about the war but not necessarily what she believed; it assumes that her poems are rhetorical performances in which stances are tried out for reasons that cannot be taken for granted at the outset....Dickinson's war poetry is referentially indeterminate. Its subject matter is rarely set forth in terms that are so explicit, so unmistakable, that an alternative reading is precluded" (1583-1584).

This same referential indeterminacy that Ben locates in Dickinson's work seems active in your own work. Many young writers are still wrestling with the question of how one's writing can engage with the present, with the political. These questions certainly engaged many Bay Area writers in the 70s and 80s and continue to do so. In fact, it seems to me, that there is a kind of implicit demand right now that poetry somehow, in some recognizable way, engage with the political. Sometimes this demand seems to include a clear representational relation--thematically or formally--between poetry and politics.

I'm wondering Beverly what your thoughts are on how poetry engages with the present, with politics and history.
*
BD: This is a huge question, hugely vexed. There's not much overtly political poetry that's not propagandistic rhetoric. Speaking for myself, I see that these concerns enter A Reading but do so obliquely. And I guess there's a good deal of indeterminacy there. However, in A-reading Spicer & Eighteen Sonnets, particularly in the sonnets, there are political subjects---addressed mostly ironically. Nevertheless, the sonnets are breathless, jagged because they are dealing with catastrophic subjects for the most part. The irony is Beckettian.
*
RTM: One of the things I'm interested in is your participation or not in the poetry scene here in San Francisco. When and why you were involved and when not and why. Part of this is related to my interest in the reception and life of a person's work and how it relates to their participation in the scene. Kathleen Fraser, as a teacher and Director of the Poetry Center, had a very public role and continues to do so. Many people studied with her and then went on to do critical work on her writing. So, there's an economy there for any writer in such a situation that helps to keep her or his work in the public eye. You've taken up a less public role; your day job was one that didn't necessarily put you always in the poetry world. I'm curious how this impacted you and what you think about this.
*
BD: My "less public role" is illusory. I've given countless readings and my work has been the subject of many critical articles. Most recently, Paul Jaussen, at the University of Washington, is writing a chapter of his PhD thesis on A Reading. However, I am by temperament reclusive and I do not seek publicity. I have never had any ambition to make "poetry" my "career." For these and other reasons I did not seek work at the college level, and I early on gave up the chance to teach in public schools. (I failed student teaching.) After I left the Poetry Center (I had been Mark's secretary) I supported myself working in programs like Poets in the Schools. I worked with Julia Vose later at Mt. Zion Hospital doing workshops with folks in the Senior Day Center. Later, I worked with young students incarcerated in the Alameda County Juvenile Hall. Our program brought workshops in both writing and photography to them. When Reagan was elected and funding for the arts dried up, I found by chance work with City College's Adult Learning Center. Here were students who, for whatever reasons, had not learned to read. It was and is a literacy program. I think I was always meant to be a poet and a literacy worker. I used to refer to my life then as being divided between "high lit and low lit." And yes, my students fed my writing. There are certainly references to them and even quotations from them in A Reading.

In thinking it over, I realize I should say more about my work at the center. It's probably that I've been drawn to "marginal" populations, and I certainly identify with folks who have trouble reading. I was a slow reader myself, backward. School frightened me and I learned how to be invisible in a classroom. My teachers never noticed that I couldn't read until I was in third grade. (How could this happen? It happens all the time.) My mother, who also thought I was reading at grade level, was informed that I couldn't read at all. Part of the trouble was that I was trying to read backward because no one had bothered to point out that reading goes from left to right. I would never have learned to read in school.

My mother taught me to read. In the safety of my own home, my mother became my tutor. I wanted to read, I was ready to read. But the school, the teachers had all failed me. Thank god for my mom. It seems to me now that after only a little bit of instruction I was actually reading very well, and have always had my nose in a book since then.
*
RTM: What are you reading these days? What excites you?
*
BD: I'm just beginning Lewis-Williams' The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art. Before that I was reading Vitebsky's study of shamanism and his book about the reindeer people of northeastern Siberia, a tribe called the Even or Eveny. Poetry: I love Jeanne Heuving's work, especially her book called Incapacity. I have to credit Jack Spicer, whose work I've returned to over the years, and my friend George Stanley who, in many ways, was my mentor when I was beginning to write poetry. And, like everyone else, I've been reading Roberto Bolano.

An Unending Reading: Part 1 of an Interview with Beverly Dahlen

Beverly Dahlen, Fall 2009
Candlestick Point State Park
Photo by Jackie Link

This interview with Beverly Dahlen was conducted via email in October 2009. It will appear here in several installments. Enjoy!

Click HERE to read some of Dahlen's poetry and HERE to read tributes to her from various contemporary writers.


RTM: Your A Reading 1-7 begins with a quote from George Steiner that references Wittgenstein and psychoanalysis. Can you talk about how you came to the idea of an “unending reading”? Life and writing as "the interminable reading. the infinite analysis." What got you interested in psychoanalysis? How did you come to be reading Freud and Lacan? And how was your interest in it perceived by others in your immediate community?
*
BD: It's difficult to untangle all the threads that lead to the source. I think the immediate idea came from Steiner, the book cited in the epigraph, but also from the method proposed in the first creative writing class I ever attended (right out of high school). My teacher suggested writing in a freely associative way, and I found that worked for me. I had been reading Freud already in high school. I was baby-sitting for some people, and one night I searched their bookshelves looking for something to read. They had a copy of that old Modern Library Edition of the works of Freud, and I dipped into it. After I read for a while, I realized it was forbidden knowledge, and so of course I kept reading that book whenever I was there. Later, Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death would be an enormous influence. And I suppose I started reading Lacan when everyone else did sometime in the late 70's. A book I credit highly was Juliet Mitchell's Woman's Estate which was a clear defense of Freud in opposition to the attacks on him from the women's movement at the time. Freud was the enemy. Mitchell's book uses Freudian analysis as well as every sort of other political analysis to illuminate, as she calls it, "woman's estate."

I forgot to mention Freud's essay: Analysis Terminable and Interminable.

*
RTM: Can you tell me a bit about how you and Kathleen Fraser and Frances Jaffer met and how you came to found the groundbreaking journal, HOW(ever)?
*
BD: Kathleen and Frances and I had been meeting for some time as a reading group. We exchanged our work with one and another and critiqued it. Kathleen had the idea to begin a small journal, something manageable, that the three of us could do together. We were interested in what other women were writing---women whose work we hadn't seen before. And we did make some wonderful discoveries----Diane Glancy, for example, the native American poet.
*
RTM: Your books, particularly A Reading 1-7 engage with, among other things, the work of Lyn Hejinian-- "writing is an aid to memory” and "a thought is the bride of what thinking," (75) and Ron Silliman--"Ron says what 'is brilliant but all wrong.' Phallus the first division, woman atomized, what is that to him, to me not that, but that also” (85). What is your relation to Language Poetry? And the New Sentence? Has that relation changed since the writing in A Reading 1-7?
*
BD: In the late 70's the language poets' star was rising. I was sharing a flat on Connecticut St. with Kathleen Frumkin and Erica Hunt--two persons who were at the time very involved with the LP movement. Barrett Watten lived right across the street. It was a very exciting time. I went to the lectures, to the readings, and sat up many nights talking about "language theory." I subscribed to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and read Saussure. But I was never quite convinced, because my bias ran toward psychology and, on the whole, there wasn't a great deal of interest in that. I don't know if "the unconscious is structured like a language" as Lacan claims. But I was pretty certain that theories of language that left out psychology were too limited for me. But of course I read their work---I liked Lyn's work, and Ron's and I argued with it in my own writing. I liked a number of the poets who had associated themselves with the movement---Kit Robinson and Alan Bernheimer come to mind. They were all very intelligent and witty poets, given to punning and irony and non sequiturs---really amusing stuff, like the 18th century. But I'm not a language poet. In these days I'm reading The Grand Piano, I check Silliman's blog, but I don't read language poetry more than (maybe less than) other kinds of poetry, or other kinds of writing.

I should add that it isn't quite accurate to say no one in the movement was very interested in psychology. Steve Benson has become a therapist and I believe Nick Piombino is either a psychiatrist or a psychoanalyst. There may be others I don't know about.
*
RTM: What if any engagement does your work have with the Beat writers? In A Reading 11-17 you write: “what is it I wanted to tell myself, who is it, another, some, Kerouac, unlike him I use the commas a lot “ (68).
*
BD: This is just a brief allusion to Kerouac's style. I liked reading that flowing prose, I loved On the Road. In the mid-50's, when I was still living in Arcata, a friend came up and played a tape of a reading that may even have been the first reading of "Howl" at the 6 Gallery. (Oct. 7, 1955). I was stunned by that poem. It seemed to me to have been a testimony, a prophecy, a vision of the horror of life in the US. I was already determined to go to SF, but I was more determined than ever when I heard Ginsberg. I did come to SF the following year, and guess what, the first reading I attended here was Allen Ginsberg's at the Telegraph Hill Neighborhood House. He didn't read "Howl" that night but he read lots of wonderful poems, probably the one about Walt Whitman in the supermarket, among others. I don't know how much my own work is influenced by the Beats---that would be for others to decide. But I am on good terms with the people at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics!

Worldstruck, with an instrument

[photo courtesy of Clay Banes of Small Press Distribution]

An Interview with Norma Cole

Robin: You were born in Canada Norma. I understand that you lived in France for a time. What made you leave, and how did you find your way to San Francisco?

Norma: Actually my husband wanted to go back to Toronto, so we did, and eventually split up. The West Coast looked very interesting to me, especially San Francisco, culturally, politically; so we (my son and I) came out here. At that time he was just about to start first grade, and I wanted to be in a place where we would want to stay—for a while, at least. Thirty years later, we’re still here.


Robin: In “A Tonalist Thinking,” Laura Moriarty writes about “a creation of a poetics in a poem” and about wanting “to make explicit the world of writing Norma and I (and Jerry [Estrin] and others) occupied together.” She discusses the absurd beauty of the Central Coast of California and writes,

“about the work of painters whose sense of the light in California I had always admired. I thought they were called Tonalists.”

Moriarty describes how she and her husband Nick Robinson stopped to see you in the hospital (you had had a stroke) and that to her description of “tonalist,” you replied “yes.” She goes on to compare the conception of A Tonalist to the pre-modernist group of painters from around the turn of the century and says that, “the movement was said to be characteristically American.” Laura also links A Tonalist to atonalism or atonality in music such as Schoenberg. Can you talk a bit about what your “yes” meant then and how you see A Tonalist in relation to your own work?

Norma: My “yes” then meant I could muse about something that was not involved with my having a stroke. I was in the hospital, couldn’t talk, walk or use the right side of my body. It was such a relief to see Laura, hear what she was thinking about—and I am always interested in the armatures people think about or towards.

I had been involved with thinking about Schoenberg, listening to his work. Reading about Schoenberg’s “Pierrot lunaire,” and also about the Committee of Mothers of Russian Soldiers, I then wrote a little “song,” a passacaglia to/for both:


I saw shells…
… that were bigger than I was.”
Journalist, Chechnya, 8 March, 1995

Rhythms are precise, the
intervals approximate

Night, passacaglia
black butterflies
in front of the sun
killing memory

Night is scored for
Soldiers mothers
Come in trains to take
Them home

Worldstruck, with an instrument
Night, gift and theft

(Contrafact, Potes & Poets Press, 1996).

Possibly it’s an “a tonalist” poem avant la lettre.


Robin: Two other things about a tonalism as an aesthetic practice or framework that interest me: 1) What is your sense of the importance of a group categorization or a named poetics for the work of individual writers and for a body of work? What work does such a label do or what advantages and perhaps disadvantages might adhere to it?

Norma: Because I don’t imagine myself adhering to a label, and can’t quite even imagine myself, I can’t say what works or doesn’t. I link to people, their writing, some dead, some living. Affinities. As Laura would say, and I would concur, a tonalism is about friendship, love, not style or label.


Robin:2) I’m also interested in the link to nation that Laura cites with regard to the Tonalist painters. Some contemporary Bay Area writers are very much interested in subverting or interrogating the category of the nation. For example, while there were anthologies in the 1980s such as In the American Tree that make explicit reference to nation, there are other writers, such as Nathaniel Mackey, whose editing of Hambone articulates a project that might be said to explicitly refuse nation as an organizing category for poetics. As a transplanted Canadian with close ties to both American, Canadian and French poets, what’s your take on all this?

Norma: Affinities. Nationless. Here I’d like to refer to Giorgio Agamben’s quote which I’ve made use of before:

“What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that human beings co-belong without any representable condition of belonging….” (Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, Trans. Michael Hardt )


Robin:While we are on the subject of A Tonalist, Norma, I also want to ask you about your visual art work. You both write and paint. Much of your poetry is attentive to the space of the page, the array of visual elements–words and typographic or diacritical marks (in “Rosetta” in the book Moira or the poem “Spinoza in Her Youth” from the book of the same title, for example). The poems often reference painting and color. What is the relationship of one to the other for you?

Norma: From my earliest years, I always drew and painted, and I always wrote, mostly poetry. And after studying French, started translating poetry. When I began to be in touch with poets, I started to write more, paint less, a question of time. I didn’t lose my interest in painting, I came at it differently, still drawing, sometimes painting, taking photographs, involving my writing with visual work, whether with others (e.g. Jess, Amy Trachtenberg, Ben Watkins) or with myself (e.g. Scout, Collective Memory, etc. and the typographic or diacritical marks you mention). I think about color, space, placement and so on, using diction, space, moves from the visual artists’ palette. The cross-border writing/painting “interferences” or references are paramount. At times, I still begin a work not knowing whether I will draw or write, starting from the same “nowhere.”

Robin: You’ve worked collaboratively with a variety of writers and artists including Michael Palmer, Jess, Amy Trachtenberg and others. What is pleasing and generative about this process?

Norma: You become startlingly aware of your “habits,” your practice. You can then try to change course, follow different tracks, traces. At times, you become one with the other person for the duration of the work; so you become another being, a dyad.

Robin: You were close friends with Robert Duncan and Jess, and also Fran Herndon, the artist whose collages accompanied Jack Spicer’s Golem. At the same time, you’ve maintained friendships with Claude Royet-Journoud and Anne-Marie Albiach, whose work is very different from the San Francisco Renaissance writers. How have you been influenced by these disparate traditions? And what is the relationship, for you, between one’s social community and one’s poetics?

Norma: Although one’s social community is a different map from the poetics map, with overlap, one might take on other experiences, incorporating them into one’s poetics. I am not always aware of influences, but I’m sure they are there.

Robin: How important is community for you now as a writer?

Norma: The community of poets is very important for me. I did not know how important it was until I went to Montreal to live in 1994. My husband, Rob (Kaufman) had gotten a job teaching at McGill University, and we didn’t know how long we would be living there. Much of the chapbook Desire & Its Double (later becoming a section of Spinoza in Her Youth) was written at that time, including the sonnet “Portuguese rose, winter’s rose,” (another “song”-like figure that will be part of my Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988—2008, City Lights). The poem starts,

I want a heart-shaped coffin, said
the song, a guitar shape how it
happens a person comes to the door
and says work makes the space where

we live a contraction of time
not to be seen is to be dead…

I would go, in the afternoons, by myself, to a little repertory cinema near the University. I remember seeing a few times the Wim Wenders film, Lisbon Story, which, with the gorgeous soundtrack by Madredeus, its fado, becomes a part of the fabric of the poem. Another a tonalist move. Or movie.

As it happened, we stayed in Montreal for nine months and moved back to San Francisco.


Robin: You were in the San Francisco Bay Area during the “poetry wars” and after them. What was that time period like for you? How were you involved or not in these contestations?

Norma: I watched some of it from the sidelines. Because I didn’t become involved with “the scene” here or there—I came to San Francisco a little too late for that—I was not really engaged with “contestations.” I was reading, writing, and above all taking care of my son, Jesse. Once I became involved with folks at New College (1980 on), I felt at home.

Robin: You’ve also done a fair amount of translation work from French to English. How do you approach the project of translation?

Norma: With particularity. By that I mean I approach each work differently. Sometimes I come to the work, sometimes it comes to me. When I talked informally about translation at Suzanne Stein’s a few years ago (“Why I Am Not A translator”), and then talked more formally at AWP (“Why I Am Not A Translator, Take 2”), I stated that I was not a translator, that I dealt with translation from the perspective of poetics, as a subset of poetics.

Robin: Can you talk about your recent site-specific gallery installation, Collective Memory, at the California Historical Society in San Francisco, which was part of The Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives fiftieth anniversary and very much about community. Collective Memory opened on December 11, 2004 and ran through April 16, 2005. I loved your “House of Hope, in memoriam Montien Boonma 1953-2000.” This three-dimensional piece consisted of 426 quotations from a variety of writers, artists, philosophers, filmmakers, etc that were printed on something that felt and looked like canvas. Each strip was suspended from above and created a kind of “house” of floating text that visitors could walk through or slip their hands into. It was very moving. Boonma was an artist from Thailand. Did you know him? Could you also talk a bit about his art?

Norma:Boonma died in 2002. I became aware of his work when Laura and Nick brought me the catalogue for his retrospective in New York, which then came to the Asian Museum in San Francisco, where we went to see it. As well as being attracted to the materials he chose to use, I felt his compassion and mindfulness in the sculpture, in the drawings. When Steve Dickison, Director of the Poetry Center at SFSU, invited me to do “an installation,” I wanted to make a book you could walk inside of, a book you could feel, touch. Where the human scale changed. I decided to make a tribute to Boonma, patterning my “House of Hope” somewhat after his. His “strips” were strands of prayer beads made of small variegated herbal medicine balls. Mine were quotes from an assortment of people (poets, philosophers, things I’d read, overheard conversations) from twenty years of keeping notebooks.

The other parts of the installation, both engaged with the nature of memory, the future-past, were “Living Room circa 1950s,” another place one could settle, and “Archive Tableau,” a wall-mounted piece. The living room was defined by two periods of time: one, putting the room together from scratch, from an imagined version; and then seeing what would happen in it, to it, involving myself as “the working poet,” being in that room every day. The living room appeared, it was a place to which many people came for 5 months, and then, in a day we shut it down, it disappeared.


Robin: I want to ask you about two life experiences or circumstances and their relationship to your art. For many years, you were, I think, a single parent, raising your son. What challenges and rewards did this situation provide for you as you sought to produce both visual art and poetry? Then, in 2002, you had a stroke. What impact has that experience had on your work?

Norma:I can only say, about raising a child, having a stroke, teaching, being in a community, having colleagues and friends, that I’m affected by experience, my experience, your experience—my writing is affected by experience at every moment. It will be layered, sutured written experience.


Robin: You also teach as part of the University of San Francisco’s Master of Fine Arts Writing Program. This semester you are teaching a course on Visionary Poetics. How does teaching impact or not your own creative process?

Norma: I like the lively interaction I have with students as well as the effort I put into the class. Any interaction or reading produces energy that will go into the making of my work.

This interview was conducted from January to February 2009 via email.

From The Angels of Light to New Narrative and Labor Activism

"...garden-variety anarcho-syndicalist (with bourgeois tendencies, of course)"--F.S. Rosa

An Interview with F. S. Rosa by Robin Tremblay-McGaw




RTM: Tell me how and when you came to San Francisco.


F.S. Rosa: I moved here in the 1970s from upstate New York after high school and crashed with a friend in the Haight, who was a supernumerary in the Angels of Light and lived in a commune in a big flat on Stanyan. Then I moved into an apartment on Central Avenue right off the Panhandle. And of course many more apartments after that. Quite a few of my friends from back east had moved here. When I arrived most of the storefronts on Haight Street were abandoned and boarded up and speed was all over the neighborhood, but there was still lots going on. San Francisco was a place where people wanted to be, just like it always is. It was very cheap to live here. I had visited SF as a child, when my father moved to CA and I visited him some summers from Connecticut. He lived on the peninsula but of course we visited SF as tourists and I decided I wanted to live in SF when I was around eight. It was only a matter of time to grow up and get here from the East Coast. Other than Ramallah or the East Bay, I’ve never really wanted to live anywhere else although I have a weakness for the Connecticut shore in the summertime.


RTM: How did you get involved in the writing scene in San Francisco?


F.S. Rosa: I make for a pretty awkward scenestress, any way you look at it and I don’t think there is or was one scene, but lots of them. Over the years I’ve gravitated to a greater or lesser extent to different groups. In the 70s artists, writers painters, musicians, underground filmmakers were swarming everywhere all over each other to get at that cheap San Francisco rent, not to mention that the city was so much nicer and freer and more fun than most other places. Gentrification was already happening, it’s most famous icon the International Hotel in old Manila Town, and before and after that there was the Redevelopment Agency devastation of the Western Addition and across Market Street in SOMA, what is now called Yerba Buena, which at one time was a working class retired seaman’s community. But it was still possible to live here very cheaply if you weren’t one of the targeted working class communities or communities of color sitting on land the Redevelopment Agency or big Hong Kong real estate conglomerates et al, wanted. We were to a certain extent unwitting shock troops in the gentrification process, including in the Haight, but that is another story. Later it happened in the Mission, but much later.

In the 1970s, anyone with the slightest literary or otherwise creative bent would have to be half dead not to be involved in some kind of scene because it was happening everywhere and you didn’t have to devote 9/10 of your life trying to pay the bills. That freed up tremendous amounts of energy and the effect of that on individuals and communities cannot be underestimated. Small bookstores and cafes with open readings were on every other street, along with storefront performance spaces and tons of little art house movie theaters. There was always a Buñuel film at one theater or another, which to me is the sign of a healthy creative metropolis since if Buñuel is always showing that is a good indication that the philistines have not completely triumphed. For fiduciary reasons, my favorite movie theater was the Times on Stockton near Broadway, or maybe it was Broadway near Stockton, that showed double features for 99 cents. It was very funky and there was no ventilation. The smoke of various kinds would get so thick by the middle of the second feature you could hardly see the screen if you were sitting in the back, but the price was right and the screener had excellent taste. Heavy on the foreign films. I learned a lot. I’d go home and write really bad poetry about all the films I’d seen. I haven’t seen it in years, and I have no idea what I’d make of it now, but El Topo really got me worked up. This was pre VCR/DVD so if you wanted to see whatever wasn’t shown on the three TV networks and public television, and Channel 36 (where Carol Doda was reading these amazing editorials on school busing or energy policy and such, with her reading glasses perched on her nose and here décolletage down to there—as surreal, or more, than anything Andre Breton could have thought up) you had to venture out into the world. It all helped get me started.

I also used to spend a lot of time in the basement reading room of City Lights books, with that great chapbook section. I didn’t have any money, so I’d just read the chapbooks there. I was mesmerized by them. Publishing a chapbook seemed like the most extraordinary, unattainable thing to me. You could sit there for hours and hours since there were plenty of tables and chairs and they wouldn’t throw you out or expect you to buy anything or get bent out of shape if you came back day after day and did the same thing. The store was a lot smaller then. A tiny upstairs part and then this big basement. A real refuge.

You could go to the Church of John Coltrane on Divisadero, and they’d feed you. I didn’t go there a lot, but I did go there. The beat and the Jazz scene, even though so much of the jazz scene in the Western Addition had been destroyed by redevelopment and the Beats had long been superseded in SF by the whole psychedelic scene, etc, was still extant, and nurtured a lot of us, even if we weren’t always consciously aware of that. North Beach was more like the Mission is today. Not quite so commercialized although well on the way there. Intersection was still in North Beach then.

The Angels of Light and their delirious offshoots were performing regularly, and in their early days they were really jaw dropping, visually spectacular; gender bending in ways that can’t be very accurately categorized by today’s standards, and they made everyone around them want to be artists and performers too. Of course there was a lot of music going on. Since tickets to concerts were beyond my budget I didn’t get to as many concerts as I would of liked, but I got to see all kinds of musicians—Tuxedo Moon performed regularly, and there were musicians and dance troupes everywhere, because they had space to practice and plenty of free music and theater in the parks.

People were not so distracted by electronic media, because it did not exist. A mixed blessing. I cannot now conceive of my life without my lap top or the internet. But it created a different dynamic involving people having much more time to meet face to face and write or paint, or perform or whatever they were doing.

Drugs were everywhere. Not just the controlled substances, but what the doctors were prescribing. Unfortunately, a few doors down from the doors of perception many people were strung out, dying a lot with the massive influx of heroin, speed and coke and later Angel Dust, or being shipped off to the psych wards. It was a very intense time—this manic, relentless creativity by people who were inventing, not following, and then these ongoing O.D.’s, accidents, suicides, murders.

AIDS did not happen until the early 80s, but there was still a lot of death by the late 70s. San Francisco, as many of us knew it, disappeared with Jonestown and the murders of George Moscone and Harvey Milk in 1978, and there were other things as well. We all had our private horrors, and then a few years later, the first onslaught of AIDS. So there is a shadow San Francisco to many of us, just behind the one that exists now. Comforting and disconcerting by turns, depending on one’s mood. Plenty to write about.

RTM: You were in Bob Gluck's Small Press Traffic workshop, yes? What was that experience like and how did it inform your writing?

F.S. Rosa: When I first joined Bob Glück’s writing workshop in the mid ‘80s he was teaching several workshops through California Arts Council Grants. Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian were very involved. This was before they were married or even a couple. Kevin was publishing Mirage, and Shy was either just about to come out or had just come out. Dodie had just published The Debbie’s I Have Known and was starting to work on her Mina Harker letters. Mike Amnasan was there and had just published I Can’t Distinguish Opposites and was now doing a lot of writing about his life as a construction worker. Camille Roy joined around the same time I did and really started developing her style and worked on her first plays in the workshop. Bruce Boone was coming less to the actual evening I attended. I think he was probably still going to the one of the other workshops, but he was a very definite presence and influence hovering over the entire proceedings. I read My Walk with Bob ,of course. We all did. Bruce could be inscrutable and very abrupt at times, and at others he was the most wily and charming raconteur with this daunting scholarship. Once he got on a roll, he could really wrap you around his finger, whether you were one person or an audience at a reading. Bob had recently published Elements of a Coffee Service and was just about to publish Jack the Modernist. Sam D’Allesandro was going to one of the other workshops I think, or at least he and Dodie were pen pals. I knew Sam in other contexts, through my friend the painter Jono Weiss, but also got to know him more as a writer through other members of the workshop. He was working on the stories that later became The Wild Creatures, published posthumously and edited by Kevin Killian.

Other writers, I’m not sure would have defined themselves as New Narrative, or can be defined as such, but who were doing very good work were John Norton, Phyllis Taylor, Richard Schwarzenberger, Tom Tolfa, Clara Sneed, Edith Jenkins and you, of course, though as I recall you didn’t come in come in until later. Edith Jenkins, and her husband Dave Jenkins (who ran the California Labor School and was a member of the ILWU), had both been blacklisted in the 50s, and she was writing a memoir about those times in addition to her poetry. I was fascinated by her work and life and that of her husband. They had known Harry Bridges, Paul Robeson, the Oppenheimers, Edward Weston, Jessica Mitford and tons of other people besides. She was big part of the workshop for me.

Bob would bring in something at the beginning of every session, from Flaubert, to Maurice Blanchot, Bataille, and so on and read from it. Heavy on the French but a lot of other things as well. It was a good way to start out the session and exposed us, or at least me, to things I wouldn’t necessarily have read, or even heard of otherwise. Then several of us would read what we had brought in that week, and the group would critique it.

Small Press Traffic was at the original space on 24th St, then moved down the street, and ended up eventually at Bob’s house. Bob was doing all this cutting edge sexual stuff with the literary theory thrown in, this really kind of revolutionary writing, but at heart he was a Victorian housewife as he will be the first to tell you, and he kept and keeps a lovely home, and is an excellent cook, so it made for a fraught but at the same time cozy atmosphere.

All the literary theory was very compelling, and irritating to me by turns, but it helped definitely make the workshop what it was. It put into high relief a lot of one’s basic assumptions about writing and how one views reality. The core of the new narrative group were all such good writers, and all so smart, and eccentric, in the best sense of the word, it made me work much harder than I otherwise might have. It was all very experimental, with a real definite degree of intellectual rigor. All the business about Post Modernism, the Frankfurt School, French Structuralism, Mayakovsky, etc., very heady and provocative. You really had to pay attention.

RTM: Did you find a community there? What did you want from it and what did or didn't you get from it?

F.S. Rosa: A literary community, most definitely, for quite a few years. Earlier I had been more around performance artists, actors, some filmmakers and a lot of painters—I was not an Angel of Light but a fellow traveler, and was doing a great deal of drawing and painting. Some performing myself in a group called ‘Warped Floors’ that was like a non-singing, non dancing auxiliary to the Angels, and I started doing a lot of staged readings and was in one of Marc Huestis’s early films, his underground comedy (for lack of a better term), ‘Whatever Happened to Susan Jane?’ (WHSJ). All very interesting, but at a certain point I decided to focus on writing. A literary community was what I was really looking for. Scenes proliferate in San Francisco, but community is hard to find. I couldn’t do everything and earn a living too, and I definitely had to earn a living, so once I was in Bob’s workshop it became obvious that this was a place where I could really develop my craft. I stumbled on the workshop because Edward Guthman, who had played a reporter in WHSJ, and whom I had become friends with (although I haven’t seen him in years), insisted that I read Jane Bowles’, My Sisters Hand in Mine, Two Serious Ladies, and so on. Millicent Dillon had written a biography of Jane Bowles—A Little Original Sin—and was doing a reading from it at Small Press Traffic. This must have been in ’82 or 83. Edward insisted that I go with him to the reading, and Bob Glück was mc-ing the event. That was where I met Bob and decided to go to one of his workshops, which I think he plugged at the reading, or maybe there were fliers posted around. Later I also did a number of staged readings of Jane Bowles’ and Millicent Dillon’s work, some with Edward and some others. Local performance artist Silvana Nova, who long ago moved to NYC was involved in some of those readings. We did a collaboration—a staged reading with Ellen Sebastian of some work during an evening when we also did some staging of Gertrude Stein short pieces in a reading series Dodie Bellamy had set up at Small Press Traffic.

I write fiction very slowly, and discard most of what I write, but over six or seven years Bob and the group vetted all the stories that eventually showed up in Post War and Other Stories, as well as other stuff I had the good sense to ditch. Dodie and Kevin helped me publish a chapbook with e.g. press, Davis Highsmith’s old press, and I published a few things in ‘Mirage.’ I did readings with Sam D’Alessandro, Camille Roy, Bob, David Lugn, John Norton and others and for several years went to readings and plays and staged readings all the time. Steve Abbot was not in the workshop, at least not the one I was in, but he was organizing a lot of readings and events. I really liked his book Skinny Trip to A Far Place, but he didn’t publish that until ’87. Roberto Bedoya ran a really good reading series out of Intersection. Going to a lot of readings is something I really miss. I just don’t have the time anymore.

Eventually the California Arts Council Grants dried up and our Republican governors decided that expanding our prison system and harassing all the undocumented folks who harvest our food and clean up after the mess the rest of us make was much more important than supporting the arts, so Bob started running the group out of his house. Around this time he became Director of the San Francisco State Poetry Center for three years. The workshop started meeting every other week rather than once a week. After the two stores closed, he moved the workshop to his house. I started working on my novel The Divine Comedy of Carlo Tresca after I finished Fred’s, and that turned into a far longer term project than I ever possibly imagined, even for a slow writer like me.

At a certain point, the group changed—once Bob became a full professor at San Francisco State it became more of an advanced class for his grad students even though he still held it at his house. I still attended because Bob’s editing was so important to me and I made some good and lasting connections at that time, most notably you and Rob Halpern. But it was just a different time, with a different group, no doubt invaluable to the core participants, but almost all the people I had started out with were gone. But the first seven or eight years were crucial for me and made a real literary community for me. It made me a writer.

RTM: Tell me about your political work and the variety of things you've been involved in over the years.

F.S. Rosa: I’m a long time rank and file labor activist, sort of a garden-variety anarcho-syndicalist (with bourgeois tendencies, of course). For most of my adult life I’ve earned my living in the trenches in private non-profit organizations, which are absurdly underpaid, so I’ve helped organize a few and have been active in my union and my local, currently Local SEIU 1021. I’ve been a shop steward, on the contract negotiation team, picket captain when we were on strike, etc. I just finished up a seven-month leave of absence from my job working for my union in the private non profit sector and the political department. Currently I’m a member and rank and file delegate from my local to the San Francisco Labor Council , arguably the most progressive Central Labor Council in the United States.

I cut my teeth on the Vietnam War, that was my first civil disobedience arrest, in high school, and of course I am against the current U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I am a member of U.S. Labor Against the War (U.S.LAW) , Bay Area Labor Committee for Peace and Justice, and the nascent U.S. LAW Middle East Task Force. In 1982 the invasion of Lebanon, the scatter bombing of Beirut by the Israeli military and the slaughter of thousands of mostly women and children, and old men in the Palestinian Refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla, (paid for by the U.S. and orchestrated by Ariel Sharon) really woke me up to what was going on in Israel/Palestine/Lebanon, and later in the Middle East as a whole, all paid for with our tax dollars. The level of misinformation on this issue, as it is distorted through the lens of the corporate media, U.S. Foreign policy, oil money, and AIPAC is shocking. Then there is the censorship in academia among other places—witness the denial of tenure to scholar Norman Finkelstein (child of Holocaust survivors and author of Beyond Chutzpah and The Holocaust Industry) and Mehrene Larudee of De Paul university recently, due to their work on this issue. People have to speak out and research what is going on beyond what the corporate press is telling us.

I went to the West Bank for six weeks with the International Solidarity Movement in 2003 . Now I work with a few groups on various projects, preferably small practical projects that yield concrete results: Arab American Union Members Council sometimes, and Jewish Voice for peace (though I am not Jewish ) are two such projects. Currently, on a volunteer basis, I work with the ad hoc labor committee of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) to bring their USDA certified organic fair trade olive oil from Palestine to the San Francisco Labor Council. Bay Area JVP sells a lot of olive oil to lots of people, but I am their point person along with Mo Shooer for local labor. Members of the SF Labor Council can make donations toward bottles of the olive oil. The donations go back to the Palestinian farmers in the form of various projects. Last year a playground was built in Tuwani; this year the proceeds go to sponsor a women’s West Bank embroidery project. Labor Council members can support this project and also learn about what is going on in the region, and different campaigns such as the Caterpillar Campaign from the small pamphlet attached to each of the bottles and by going to the JVP website.

As a rank and file SF Labor Council delegate, not a high level official, it’s possible to get things done if you understand the territory in which you are working. Not always easy, but possible. Bay Area Labor Committee for Peace and Justice (LC4PJ) has an informal sister union relationship with a PGFTU local (Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions) in East Jerusalem, and helped arrange for the president of that local, Manawell Abdellah, to speak before a very well attended SF Labor Council breakfast when he was in the Bay Area recently, and we also have raised money for much needed computer equipment for his office. LC4PJ also co-sponsored several events when Mohamed Khatib of the Bilin Popular Committee Against the Wall was here. Khatib is frequently referred to as the Martin Luther King of the West Bank.

RTM: In addition to a lot of discussion about writing (and particularly poetry) and community, writers are very much interested in writing and its relationship to politics; for example, there was a recent article in The Nation about poetry and politics, and the Small Press Traffic conference in May 08 on Aggression and poetry and political antagonism, etc. I'd like to hear your thoughts about this nexus of things--writing, community, politics.

F.S. Rosa: I missed the conference—although I’m certainly glad it happened— and the article, so I am not able to comment on those things themselves, but as for the mixing of writing, community and politics, I’m all for it. I don’t think it’s the only way to be a writer, or any other kind of artist. There’s no one way to be an artist or writer. But mixing it up with community and politics is one way. We can always use more Pablo Nerudas.

RTM: How do you see your political activities as related to writing?

F.S. Rosa:I think we all get our assignments. Not sure how, but we do. I am a big believer in aesthetics for their own sake, and the development of the writer and artist outside of any constraints or context of the state or politics. No one should be scolded because they don’t participate in that realm, but that is not my assignment. I am also convinced of the importance of the writer as agent of social change. Within this context, my patience is minimal for those who think that good politics automatically makes for good writing. It doesn’t matter how good your politics are, if you are reciting platitudes and PC clichés. What is interesting is where the politics and aesthetics intersect whether it is fiction or non-fiction and if you can pull off the unexpected and make the work interesting as literature or non fiction as well, and if you apply some rigor and discipline to the deployment of your craft. One thing that interests me is how individuals function in relation to each other and their attempts to retain and negotiate their humanity within the context of late stage corporate capitalism gone wild. I retain archaic notions of a working class intelligentsia. I recently discovered the work of Victor Serge. Don’t know what took me so long, but his writing and politics are inseparable, and he is one of the great writers of the last century.

RTM: You were part of The Cockettes in San Francisco, yes? Tell me about that.

F.S. Rosa: No! I most definitely was not a Cockette. That was a signal honor reserved for the very few, and they’d already broken up by the time I moved to San Francisco. The best sources on the Cockettes are the documentary film The Cockettes by David Weissman and Bill Weber and also Pam Tent’s book Midnight at the Palace: My Life as A Wild Cockette . Both highly recommended. The Angels of Light were in ascendance when I moved here in 1972. I crashed for about a month with a good friend of mine from back East, Charles MacMillan, who had a room in Scrumbly Koldewyn’s apartment off the Panhandle. Scrumbly, the anchor of that household, was a former Cockette and was (is) a great pianist and songwriter, with a vast musical repertoire. He was the set builder and all around den mother to the Cockettes and generally acknowledged as the most together and responsible of the group. He and Pam Tent married and had a child. Not your standard wedding or relationship. I moved here shortly after that. All kinds of people would drop by that house—Divine, John Waters, Sylvester, Mink Stole and so on. This was before they were as well known as they are now, but they all had an underground audience. It was a huge flat and, of course, the rent was a couple of hundred dollars a month. Scrumbly was a great cook too. Still is, I expect, although I haven’t seen him in years.

The Angels of Light were a kind of splinter group from the Cockettes, but also a new thing entirely. My second night at Scrumbly’s we all took a big field trip to Rio Nido up North and I got to see my first Angels. Mindblowing does not begin to describe it, especially for a seventeen year old who has just escaped from Clarence, New York. My friend Charles was in the chorus. The performance was extraordinary, and of course enhanced for many in the audience by all kinds of controlled substances. That was not me, that came later, but the contact high was pretty impressive.

The Angles believed in free theater and for many years refused to charge money for shows. At their best, and some of that credit must go to a lot of the costume work of Beaver Bauer, and the lighting and set design of Brian Mulhern, they were a visually indescribable spectacle and truly revolutionary—anarchic and fearless—not to mention hilariously funny with songs and dance numbers that were a lysergically enhanced hybrid between the Bacchantes and the Rockettes. A kind of controlled and at times not so controlled anarchy on stage that just split the world apart. At their worst, they were a disorganized, stoned mess upstaging each other in cool costumes, or upstaging each other by taking those costumes off, but that’s what made their shows so remarkable. You never knew what you were in for. Charles, who had gone from being known among friends in upstate New York as ‘Watertown Charlie’ and wore flannel shirts like everyone else, was now calling himself Charles Isis and wearing eyeliner and a silver lame loincloth, etc., when the occasion suited, and was developing rather too much of a liking for heroin—this latter quirk eventually ending with predictably disastrous results. All very disconcerting but he championed and had always championed my writing (and drawing and painting too), far more than it deserved, since I was writing a lot of bad poetry at the time. He himself was a wonderful artist and poet, and I wonder what he could have done with his considerable talents had he not been so determined to squander them. Some of the Angels paid attention to my work, and at the time, to me. It was like being praised by Cocteau or something. Adrian Brooks, also an Angel, gave me my first typewriter, this beautiful little sage green Olivetti portable that I pounded into the ground. Janice Sukaitis put me in one of her plays, ‘Mama’ a black comedy about her father’s death and funeral in Queens when she was in her teens It was a ‘Warped Floors’ production. I played her little sister. I got to know Marc Huestis, with who I am still friends, who was/is one of the co-founders of the Gay Film Festival, as it was called then, the first year of which consisted of super eights projected onto a white bed sheet in an old storefront. He went on to make a lot of indie films, the latest being Lulu Gets a Facelift, http://www.lulugetsafacelift.com and produces many events and fundraisers at the Castro Theater, whose participants range from Daniel Ellsberg to Ann Margaret and everyone you can think of in between.

Later I moved to another household on Central St. where Patrick Cowley lived. He became Sylvester’s keyboardist for several years and was responsible for that really distinctive keyboard synthesizer sound on some of Sylvester’s Albums although this was much later in the late seventies/early eighties. He was one of the first people in San Francisco to die of AIDS.

At the time, although I was in awe of a lot of them, I just kind of took it for granted that I was around all these brilliant artists all the time. I thought it would always be like that.

RTM: How much did you experience or participate in the "poetry wars" in the Bay Area in the 70s and 80s? How did it or not impact your writing and participation in the writing community?

F.S. Rosa: I was not on the battlefield, not even as a foot soldier, but I tried to decipher the regular dispatches from the field. And since language poetry was of such interest to Bob, Bruce, Kevin, Dodie, etc., it interested me by remove.

Any movement that has the good sense to take Gertrude Stein to its bosom and can produce a writer with the talent of Beverly Dahlen obviously has something going for it. Language Poetry shook thing ups, and sometimes things need to be shaken up and the old sacred cows chased around the literary pasture. It got a lot of people reading things, and thinking about things they wouldn’t have otherwise have been thinking. It challenged basic assumptions.

But I found a lot of it very insular and there was a level of smug self-regard among some of the more vociferous adherents that was extremely irritating. Many tempests in teapots, and the second string acolytes tended to take themselves very, very seriously without having done any of the heavy lifting— although they certainly had the lingo down, along with attitudes far in excess of their literary ability. I found their work, in particular, r=e=a=l=l=y b=o=r=i=n=g and without the intellectual rigor and glittering intelligence of the front line, as it were, irascible as some of them could be.

I am fairly populist by nature, and the idea that you had to go to grad school to be a poet, or to understand poetry—well I just didn’t buy it. Not that I have a problem with anyone doing that if that’s what they want to do. Many brilliant poets and writers function out of the academic realm, including some of the language poets. The academy is unquestionably one of the bulwarks against barbarism at any point in history (and we seem to be at one of those points now), but it’s not the only one— so is the voice from the street, and plenty of other voices too. So I did not think that language poetry was the sine qua non of literary excellence or intelligence, and that all literature and poetry before was just a pale precursor to this, the apotheosis of poetry. I also didn’t understand the insistence (not by all, but by some) of gratuitously dissing other writers (rather than leading by their own merits), including Diane di Prima, who was and remains one of my literary heroes. My Life as A Woman alone sets her reputation, but so does the whole body of her work and amazing life. It deeply offended me to see someone of her talents and contributions dismissed.

But overall, I think these skirmishes between formalism and romanticism, which is what a lot of all that seemed to be about, are inevitable, and probably healthy in the long run when things swing too far in one direction or the other. All that blood spilled and pens poked at the heinous opposition nourishes the field. It is heartening in this increasingly commodified existence, and commodified to an almost totalitarian extent through the alarming inroads of corporate media into our consciousness and subconscious, through their succubi & incubi of the advertising industry, that there are still people fighting over literary and philosophical ideas that do not involve large amounts of capital or real estate.

RTM: Your book, Post War and Other Stories from Ithuriel's Spear, a press for which you also serve as an editor, is very much influenced by new narrative in its use of multiple narrative frameworks, personal names. It also seeks to comment on narration and storytelling using what Bruce Boone has called text/meta-text. Did you self-consciously set about writing a new narrative text? Do you see yourself as a new narrative writer? How were you influenced by Gluck and Boone?

F.S. Rosa: I didn’t know I was a new narrative writer until Kevin Killian said I was one, but I was delighted by the news. I never set out to be a new narrative writer. I set out to be a good writer, and I was very influenced by the new narrative writers. They were obviously doing such groundbreaking work, and their work was really provocative, and they as individuals were definitely not standard issue and they paid attention to my work when no one else was, so it stands to reason that my work reflects theirs, in part, stylistically. The focus on narrative rather than plot, their use of first person and often present tense, the referencing of rarified, complicated ideas while the characters go about their quotidian daily chores—and all that screwing! It all fascinated me.

I was much more interested in developing a style, rather than adhering to a literary theory. I am flummoxed, to a certain extent by literary theory, as provocative as I find bits and pieces of it. I am not a parrot, or a mynah bird, so I don’t want to expound on theory just for the sake of repeating what others say, although I could probably fake it, at least for a little while. But my mind just doesn’t work that way.

RTM: Certainly your book has content that addresses various political issues. Do you consider that its form (for purposes of discussion I'm turning to this weird and inaccurate binary of separation--content and form--) is related in some way to politics?

F.S. Rosa: As noted, I am a fairly instinctual writer who is interested in the way that individuals navigate and maintain their humanity (or don’t) within the context of late stage capitalism, and militarism and an all encompassing corporate media that many people take for reality, and the way in which here in the technologically advanced 21st century we are still held in a stranglehold by millennia-old thought forms, such as the more fundamentalist and oppressive forms of organized religion, patriarchy, etc. Encountering the new narrative form allowed me to finally be able to approach these topics in a way which I think after much trial and error, has some stylistic integrity.

But I also read a lot of non- fiction and am really influenced by it; in my estimation some of the best writing is coming out the Palestinian Diaspora and the Jewish anti- right wing Zionist movement, there and in the U.S. Any thing by the late Edward Said, Norman Finkelstein’s extraordinary work, the work of the late Tanya Reinhardt, Amira Haas who writes from the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz and of course the journalist Robert Fisk. Trotsky’s biography, My Life, has stunning passages about nature—growing up on a farm and the animals there, and his place on the farm and how the peasants survived. Passages about escaping from Siberia by reindeer, and his writing about the reindeer have had a real hold over me for many years and form the basis of my novel, along with the work of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Bill Heywood and Emma Goldman and some of the work about Carlo Tresca: All the Right Enemies, The Life and Murder of Carlo Tresca by Dorothy Gallagher, and more recently Carlo Tresca, by Nunzio Pernicone.

But I also like to read popular genre fiction. I love good science fiction and mysteries—Walter Mosley, William Gibson, Ursula K Leguin, Steven Saylor, etc., and the whole rigor and discipline of writing well for popular genres fascinates me. I like historical novels. I get enormous pleasure out of all of the above, and pleasure is an important thing. And many of them I think are very subversive politically, in the best sense of the word, and they reach many people.

RTM: Tell me about your editing work with Ithuriel's Spear. How did you get involved in it?

F.S. Rosa: Ithuriel’s Spear is a small press underwritten by Intersection for the Arts. The publisher is James Mitchell who was also one of the co-founders of Small Press Traffic. I am co-editor with Jim. I didn’t know Jim very well before he decided to publish what became Post War and Other Stories, but we were fellow Zen students, and during the process of publishing Post War and after, we became literary colleagues, and he offered me the opportunity to bring other writers to the press, which he was trying to expand. I first introduced him to Richard Schwarzeneberger who published In Faro’s Garden with us in 2006, although I didn’t edit Richard’s work. Camille Roy approached us a couple of years ago and told us she had an old manuscript of Mike Amnasan’s—LIAR—which turned out to be the last copy anywhere. Mike had thought it lost. We would have been fools not to take it. Mike worked for years as a union sheet metal worker in SF, and is now finishing a PhD in philosophy at the New School in NYC. That is not a range of experience you find many places. It was my first editing project with the press, although Mike didn’t need that much editing, and he had also worked with Camille and Bob Glück on the manuscript. But I did make some suggestions which Mike incorporated, especially around the ending, and I shepherded the whole project through to publication. The next book was The Idol Lover and Other Stories of Pakistan, by Pakistani American writer Moazzam Sheikh which was a much more hands on editing project for me. I worked very closely with Moazzam on that book. We were all very pleased with the results.

RTM: What are some of your next projects?

F.S. Rosa: Jim has translated and published a 9th century German/Latin gardening book, On the Cultivation of Gardens, by Walafrid Strabo—our first book for 2009. Richard Scwarzenberger did the introduction. Jim is also working on a book of his own collected poems. We are also waiting for your manuscript which we look forward to publishing, when—ahem—it arrives. We will also be publishing poet Lew Ellingham in 2009; this is a very recent development, evolving out of meeting Lew at the December SPT Bev Dahlen tribute, and we really appreciate Kevin Killian’s backing of this project. We very much want to continue working with Moazzam Sheikh and with him to publish other South Asian writers since he is very involved in that community, and there is a thriving South Asian writing scene in the Bay Area.

I also just started working with John Goins, a very under published African American writer who grew up in Washington D.C., but has lived in the Bay Area for years. We hope to have a collection of his stories out in ’09 or ’10. We would like to publish more new narrative writers and new narrative fellow travelers, and more translation. We are unfortunately constrained by the usual small press twin goblins of limited time and very limited funds although we soldier on. We welcome suggestions and ideas around funding sources, foundation money, grants, etc.

RTM: What are you working on now? Do you send writing out for publication? Why/why not?

F.S. Rosa: I just finished my novel, The Divine Comedy of Carlo Tresca. I will definitely be sending it out for publication in ‘09. I am also working on some essays including some very short non-fiction pieces about my trip to the West Bank, a few of which I read at the SF Poetry Center this year and which I hope to be able to re-tackle when the novel is out of the way and hopefully finds a publisher. It’s a bit too much of a handful for Ithuriel’s Spear at this time.

I write very slowly. I am very distracted by earning a living and other things, so I don’t often send work out because I don’t have it to send out. Through a labor connection, I was invited awhile back by the small French Left online journal, Dialogue Review to do a book review of Jimmy Carter’s book – Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. It’s the only thing I’ve ever had translated—into Spanish, French and Arabic, since the journal publishes in those languages. It was in the April ’07 issue. I’d love to do more reviewing, but things like that don’t come my way very often. I would really like to write a mystery novel.

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F.S. Rosa is the author of Post War and Other Stories and has lived in San Francisco since the 1970s. She is a co-editor of Ithuriel’s Spear Press with publisher James Mitchell and has just finished a novel, The Divine Comedy of Carlo Tresca. She is a rank and file member of SEIU 1021 and a member delegate to the San Francisco Labor Council representing same. She is involved in several human rights groups pursuing justice and accurate reporting in Israel/ Palestine and the Middle East.


For fabulous photos of The Cockettes, click here.