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Friday, February 16, 2018 - 06:30
The theme for the current Lesbian Book Bingo square is "Fantasy" and Daughter of Mystery is featured as suggested reading, though of course the Alpennia books would work for any number of thematic squares. See my first post in this series for information about the Bingo challenge and to find the start of my series of mini-stories on the themes of the bingo squares. I'm doing a piece of flash fiction (well, sometimes almost verging into short story territory) for each theme, with the added challenge of placing them all in a historic setting and linking all the stories together loosely as a single narrative.
As with the "historical fiction" square, I've taken up the challenge of creating what my late 17th century characters would consider to be fantasy. This was exactly the era when the creation of literary fairy tales was a favorite pastime among the salonnières of Paris, so what better fantasy tale than one of fairies and magic? Isabel and Laura, who were introduced in the last story, are now back in Paris and invited to the salon of the eventually-to-be-infamous Madame de Murat. I'd originally made Madame d'Aulnoy the hostess of my salon, but by complete coincidence, Mari Ness's series on fairy tales at Tor.com had an essay as I was writing this on Madame de Murat. And when I saw the click-bait description of her as "a lover of women, and who, authorities insisted, needed to spend some quality in prison, and who, she herself insisted, needed to dress up as a man in order to escape said prison" how could I resist handing the reins over to her? She may well return in a future story.
The telling and re-invention of fairy tales was a favorite activity of late 17th century salons and resulted in several of the significant collections of the genre from this era. I don't think it was done in the sort of "shared world story-telling" method I portray here, but the tale itself is also my own invention, though cobbled together from recognizable patches. I hope you're enjoying this little tour through the genres.
I've also indulged in a reference to a recent online conversation, spread across twitter and blogs, about the all-too-frequent trope of dead mothers in fantasy. I won't say more, but those in the know may recognize a guest appearance by a certain French fantasy author.
Three White Doves (Lesbian Book BIngo: Fantasy)
After the hardships of the siege of Montigny, Paris seemed like a wondrous fairyland. And once I was strong enough to go about in society, nothing was a more certain key to the gate of that land than the invitation that I hurried to share with my beloved Laura. Perhaps, I thought, it would lift the melancholy that had settled over her since our return. Perhaps it would drive out of her memory the sight of the men she had tended on the battlefield, if that was what lay behind her moods. No woman could help but be wounded to the heart at such sights.
Laura looked up from her reading with a start as I waved the folded paper at her, then relaxed when she saw my own smile. “What is it Isabel? You wouldn’t need a letter to tell you if the baby had cut his first tooth and it’s too early for him to have babbled something that you took to be ‘Maman.’ Who has sent you news?”
“Not news at all,” I told her. “We are invited to the salon of Madame de Murat!”
I could tell that Laura had no idea what honor had been conferred on us, though I was certain it was only for her sake that I’d been invited at all. I was neither witty nor learned enough to have caught de Murat’s interest, but Madame Laura Alberti, who had trained as a physician at the University of Bologna—now there was a prize for any salonnière!
We were escorted into Madame de Murat’s chamber by a pair of black pages, both dressed in scarlet coats and turbans, but the girl in skirts of course, and the boy in breeches and shoes with curled-up toes. The boy announced us in a soft rich voice, “My lady, here are Baroness Isabel de Maricourt and Madame Laura Alberti.” The girl brought refreshments and showed us to our places. Not in the place of honor, near to where Madame de Murat held forth on her bed, but in comfortable chairs by the window.
I was tongue-tied at the faces that turned to greet us. There was the famous Madame d’Aulnoy and her dear friend, and so many more that I had heard whispered of or seen in passing when I was presented at court. But I managed to return the greeting and make my curtsey without sounding so dull that de Murat would change her mind. I only hoped that I would not be asked to recite or to give my opinions on philosophy.
After an hour, as the conversation moved from poetry to strange sights seen traveling in far lands, Madame de Murat announced, “We shall now play the fairy tale game. Who will give us something to start?”
The tall man standing close at the side of Madame d’Aulnoy called out, “Doves! The tale must have three white doves.” And everyone laughed because they knew that his mistress bore three doves on her family crest.
“A poor girl who marries a king,” suggested another.
“That’s no help at all,” de Murat chided. “Half the stories begin or end with a poor maiden marrying well. But we shall use it. I will give you the beginning and then choose who will continue the tale. Once upon a time, there was a rich merchant who had a beautiful daughter—now, now you must not interrupt me, she will become poor before she marries, I promise you! There was a rich merchant who had a beautiful daughter but her sorrows began early and as she wept on her mother’s grave, there came—”
“Fie! I must protest!” The interruption came from Madame de Bodard. “We’ve had too much of dead mothers in these stories. “Let her mother be alive.”
Madame de Murat seemed both amused and affronted but she nodded. “As you will. There was a rich merchant and his wife, who was most assuredly not dead, who had a beautiful daughter named Isabel.”
I started when she spoke the name, but mine is a common name—there was at least one other Isabel in the room—and no reason to think she singled me out.
“At the girl’s christening, a ragged child appeared and asked for broken meats from the christening feast. The merchant felt generous because of the joyful day and commanded that the poor child be seated with the other guests. When she was seated at the table, the rags fell away and all could see by the shining garments she wore that she was of the fairy kind. It came time for the guests to bring gifts to the newborn and the fairy opened her hands to show three white doves that fluttered and cooed, tu-tur tu-tur. ‘On the day that you need your heart’s desire,’ the fairy said. ‘Whisper it to one of the doves and toss it into the sky and it will come to fetch me.’ As the girl Isabel grew, the doves were always at her side, fluttering and cooing, until she thought no more about them than one might of a cat. Now Charles,” she said to the tall man, “you may continue the tale and tell us how she came to be poor.”
The story continued as each voice that Madame de Murat chose took up the thread. The shape of these stories was familiar to us all, and I thought that even I might acquit myself fairly in the game, though I hoped to be spared.
The merchant experienced a reverse of fortunes. First one ship, then another was lost at sea. Just when his daughter was nearing an age to be wed, not only had her dowry been lost to their creditors, but they were near to being driven from their home with nothing but the clothes on their backs. But when fortune was at its lowest, Isabel’s mother remembered the fairy’s promise and she came to her daughter and said, “Isabel my dearest, you see how it is with us. We have fallen low in the world. But your fate, at least, can be assured. Send one of the white doves to the fairy and tell her that your heart’s desire is a dowry so that you can escape your poor parents’ doom.”
Isabel called one of the doves to her finger. It cocked its head as if it were listening as she leaned closely and whispered, “My father needs only another chance to make his fortune again. I will not seek to escape their fate. Please send enough gold that my father can buy new ships and cargoes to fill them.” She raised her hand and let the dove fly off into the heavens.
The next day, the dove returned and fluttered down the basement stairs into the farthest darkest corner of the store rooms. When Isabel followed where the dove had gone, she found a beautiful maiden, a few years older than herself, sitting on top of an ancient iron-bound chest. “Is gold your heart’s desire?” the fairy asked.
Isabel shook her head. “I want no gold for me. My heart’s desire is to take this burden from my father and to save my mother from being driven out of her home. I want nothing for myself.”
“Then you shall have what you ask,” the fairy said and she became a dove and flew back up the stairs and disappeared through a window into the sky.
The chest had stood in that corner since Isabel was a tiny girl and she had never seen it open. Now she unclasped the fastenings and struggled to lift the heavy lid and found it was filled to the brim with gold.
Madame de Murat crooked her finger at another of her guests. “Now it is your turn, and I suggest you remember that our beautiful Isabel must wed a king.”
The merchant quickly paid off his debts and financed two new ships to return his fortunes. Isabel and her mother had new silk dresses and they moved to a larger house in the center of town with a garden where the two white doves perched on a fountain all day and cooed, tu-tur, tu-tur. The merchant told no one whence the money had come, but his wife became tired of turning away the curious questions of their neighbors and said as a joke, “How did we get so much gold? Why, my daughter spun it from straw, of course!”
Rumor went around the town quickly that the merchant’s lovely daughter could spin straw into gold. Soon there were offers of marriage and the merchant thought he had only to choose the best of them to assure her happiness. But before the choice had been made, a messenger of the king arrived and commanded the merchant’s presence.
“The king has come to know that your daughter can spin straw into gold,” he said.
And what could the merchant say in return? It’s a perilous thing to call a king a liar. So he said nothing.
“The king wishes to see proof of this wonder,” the messenger continued. “If it is true, he will wed your daughter and make her his queen. If it is false, he will send you all into exile for your lies.”
The merchant took counsel with his wife and daughter and told them the king’s command. “It was foolish to claim such a thing, even in jest, and see where we are now. But daughter, send a dove to the fairy and tell her of your plight.”
“How can I do that?” Isabel asked. “I can’t tell her that it’s my heart’s desire to be able to spin straw into gold or to wed a king. I can only tell her that I wish all of us to be safe. Perhaps the safest thing to do is take ship into exile.”
They argued through the night, but Isabel would not be budged. And in the morning the king’s men came and built a house with locks on the doors, and they placed the merchant’s daughter inside with straw and a spinning wheel and told her to summon them when it had been turned to gold.
At first Isabel wept, sitting among the straw without a soul to comfort her, not even the doves. But just as the church bells chimed for midnight—
With a mischievous expression, Madame de Murat held up her hand to stop the speaker and waved it to point at the next teller of tales who looked flustered and took several starts to begin.
Just as the church bells chimed for midnight, there was a rustling in the pile of straw and a strange little man in ragged clothing crawled out, rubbing his eyes as if waking from a long sleep. When he saw Isabel, he asked, “Why do you weep? There’s no rest for a body with you wailing so loudly.”
Isabel told him the tale, about her mother’s joke and the king’s command, and the impossible task she had been given. She didn’t tell him about the fairy or the doves, though she couldn’t have said why.
“Straw into gold? That’s easy enough!” the little man said. “What will you give me if I do it for you?”
Isabel tried to think of what the strange little man might want. “My father could build you a house so you needn’t sleep in a pile of straw,” she offered.
The man shook his head. “I could have a house any time I chose.”
“My mother could make you a suit of clothes, finer than any you’ve ever seen,” Isabel said.
“I could have whatever clothes I want,” the man said, and as he said it, he snapped his fingers and he was wearing a suit of green silk brocade.
“What do you want?” Isabel asked in despair. She didn’t really want to be sent into exile, and now that hope was in sight she was thinking that it might not be such a bad thing to marry a king and become a queen, though she would never have called it her heart’s desire.
The man said, “My magic cannot work on the living. I long to have a child of my own. Promise to give me your first-born daughter and I’ll spin the straw into gold for you.”
Isabel was horrified at the demand, but then she thought to herself, “I have no child yet and who is to say I’ll ever have one? And if I become queen, I’ll have guards and ladies in waiting to protect me.” So she agreed to the bargain.
With that, the little man set to work and long before the cock crowed, every scrap of straw had been turned to gold. “Remember your promise,” he said and he disappeared up the chimney just before the king’s men opened the door at Isabel’s call.
So Isabel married the king and became queen and she and the two white doves went to live in the palace. And in a year and a day, Isabel knew she was with child.
Madame de Murat held up her hand again. “A trifle unimaginative, perhaps, but it will do. And who shall continue the tale?” This time she turned to my beloved Laura. “Madame Alberti, have you seen how our game is played? You’ve guided children into the world,” with a nod to me, “let us hear what you can do with this one.”
Laura looked in my direction as if asking for permission and I gave a faint nod, though I didn’t know what I was agreeing to.
In a year and a day, Isabel knew she was with child. Fearing the bargain she’d made, she went privately to her mother and confessed the whole to her. “Tell me what to do,” she begged. “If my husband the king knows I’ve bargained away our child he will cast me off. You’re so much more clever than I am. What shall I do?”
Isabel’s mother kissed her and said, “It was a foolish bargain you made, but I can see by the way you’re carrying that the child will be a boy. You bargained only for a first-born daughter. If your first-born is a son, then you will be free of your promise.”
That cheered her heart and Isabel returned to the palace and made ready for the birth of a son. But Isabel’s mother couldn’t resist telling her friends how clever she had been and word of it came to the strange little man who had spun straw into gold. He went up to the castle and rapped on the door to the queen’s chamber. Rat-a-tat-tat. Nor all the ladies in waiting could keep him out. When he came to Queen Isabel he demanded, “Will you keep your bargain with me?”
“I will,” she said. “I promised you my first-born daughter. And if my first-born is a daughter—” she laid her hand protectively across her belly, “then she is yours. But if I bear a son as my first-born, then we are quit.”
The little man stormed forward, his face blazing with anger and he laid his own hands on the queen’s belly and knew that she indeed bore a son. “Then he will never be born,” the man said. And with a cry, Isabel felt the child die within her. Her ladies gathered round to tend to her and no one saw the strange little man leave.
I stifled a little sob. So it had been with my first. I knew when he had quickened and I knew just as surely when he stilled within me. But Laura continued the tale.
Queen Isabel was ill for many months, but in time the roses came back to her cheeks and the smile to her lips and then one day she knew she was again with child. This time she sent no word to her mother and she told none of her ladies in waiting. But in time her belly swelled so much that the secret could not be kept. Soon the word went around in castle that there would be an heir. From the castle it went to the marketplace, and from the marketplace to the ears of the strange little man.
Once again he came rat-a-tat-tatting on the door to the queen’s chamber, and once again he would not be gainsaid. “Will you keep your bargain with me?” he asked Isabel.
“I will keep my bargain,” she said hollowly. “But I do not know whether I bear a daughter or a son.”
Again the little man laid his hands on the queen’s belly and again he cursed and swore. “A son! But neither will this one be your first-born if I have to do with it!”
Isabel twisted to get away from him, but he dug his fingers into her belly as if he were reaching through to the child within and with a great gout of blood, she felt the child still within her and swooned to the ground.
Madame d’Aulnoy said, “This seems a dark and terrible tale. Perhaps we’ve heard enough for one day.”
But Madame de Murat answered back, “The world can be a terrible place. I shall let Madame Alberti continue with her tale.”
Laura bowed and she looked at me with the same compassion I’d seen in those long days of anxious waiting.
The third time that Queen Isabel felt a child quicken within her, she knew that she bore a daughter, and she despaired. She kept the secret for many long months, until she knew it was in vain. Then she remembered the white doves. It had been so many years and she had never been certain what her heart’s desire might be, but she knew that she couldn’t bear to lose another child, either in life or in death. She took up one of the doves and whispered to it, “Go find your mistress. Tell her my heart’s desire is to be freed from the bargain I made and to keep this child.”
The dove flew up into the sky and many days passed with no sign of an answer until Isabel felt the pangs of birth beginning. As she labored, Isabel cried out for her mother and for the fairy of the doves. Her mother was at her side, but the fairy did not come, even when they laid the crying infant in her arms.
“Where is my dove?” Isabel cried. “What shall I do when the spinning man comes?”
But then a waiting woman came in all pale and trembling and she said, “Out in the courtyard, come see.” Though she was still weak from the birth, Isabel was helped out to see what was in the courtyard. And there was a vast flock of snow-white doves, fluttering and cooing around a small heap of rags. The birds were pecking at it as they would at a heap of corn in the field but there was nothing else to be seen when they rose up in a great cloud and circled three times before flying away. The strange little spinning man was never seen again.
Laura was watching me as she told the tale and I knew it was for me. There had been no strange magical man stealing my children before they were born, only my own weak body. But even so my own guardian fairy had vanquished the curse. I thought of my son in his cradle at home.
“Now that seems like a fitting end,” Madame de Murat said. “But one dove remains. Perhaps our own Isabel will tell us what became of it?”
She looked at me and I could feel my tongue tripping over itself. I would make a fool of myself before all these people, but I would do it for Laura.
One day, Queen Isabel was sitting in the garden when the king had gone off hunting, watching her daughter play among the flowers and holding her newborn son in her arms, and a snow-white dove flew up and settled onto her shoulder singing tu-tur, tu-tur and bobbing its head. In that moment, she knew there was only one thing left as her heart’s desire. She whispered it to the dove and watched as it flew up into the blue heavens.
In an hour, just as the sun was fading from the sky, she heard a fluttering of wings and turned to see the fairy of the doves standing before her in the garden.
“Why have you called me, Isabel,” the fairy asked. “What is your heart’s desire?”
“Hasn’t the dove told you?” Isabel said.
The fairy shook her head. “All it would say was tu-tur tu-tur.”
“But that is my heart’s desire,” Isabel said. “Tu, you. You are the only thing that would make my happiness complete. You have been with me as a dove since the day of my christening, only asking what you could give. And now there is nothing else I want but your company at my side.”
The fairy smiled at her and took her hand and they were never parted again in this world.
I looked up at Laura to see if she had understood my meaning and I could see the weight of melancholy drop from her shoulders. Had she doubted that I wanted her? Had she thought I valued only the service she had rendered? Would she believe what I had never before found words to say?
“An odd tale,” Madame de Murat said, “but it will do. Perhaps I will add it to my collection. I’m writing a book, you know.”
(copyright 2018 Heather Rose Jones, all rights reserved)
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Thursday, February 15, 2018 - 08:00
In this second novel in de Bodard's "Dominion of the Fallen" world, that world expands much further to encompass the dragon empire under the Seine and its political complexities and entanglements with the Houses ruled by fallen angels. As before, we get a dystopia of ruthless power and magic and the precarious position of ordinary mortals whose only safety is to tie their allegiance to a stronger being. But things are always more complex than that, as we see through the experiences of Madeleine, one of the carry-over characters from the first book, who hates and fears the head of her House but finds herself bound by both magic and loyalty to work for that House's stability.
The other major continuing character is the Annamite immortal, Philippe, who fails in his goal of keeping his head down and out of trouble. With another key character being a member of the dragon court, working as a spy in House Hawthorn, we get a deep immersion in the cross-cultural dynamics of de Bodard's magical Paris. My personal favorites (for obvious reasons) are the fallen angel Berith and her pregnant mortal lover Françoise. For me, the casual queer relationships in these novels are a major draw. And despite the constant violence and cruelty, there's never a whiff of queer tragedy being used to manipulate the reader's experience.
I fell like I'm not really tallking about the story, as such. De Bodard has a top-notch talent for world-building and efficient exposition. Her characters are complex and--well, "human" isn't always the right word--but believable, with motivations that drive the plot without ever feeling contrived. One of the other big things I love about these novels is how surprising they are. There are no well-worn tropes or predictable twists, and yet even the most unexpected turns make perfect sense and have been rooted in what came before. If you want to read something that is going to be a different sort of fantasy that any you've read before, check them out!
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ReviewsWednesday, February 14, 2018 - 07:00
Lace and Blade 4 comes out today! The important contents, of course, is my new Alpennia story "Gifts Tell Truth", but here's the full table of contents:
- “At the Sign of the Crow and Quill,” by Marie Brennan
- “On the Peacock Path,” by Judith Tarr
- “Sunset Games,” by Robin Wayne Bailey
- “Sorcery of the Heart,” by Lawrence Watt-Evans
- “The Butcher’s Boy and the Piri Folk,” by Pat MacEwen
- “Gifts Tell Truth,” by Heather Rose Jones
- “A Sword for Liberty,” by Diana L. Paxson
- “Hearts of Broken Glass,” by Rosemary Edghill
- “The Game of Lions,” by Marella Sands
- “The Sharpest Cut,” by Doranna Durgin
- “Pawn’s Queen,” by India Edghill
- “The Heart’s Coda,” by Carol Berg
- “The Wind’s Kiss,” by Dave Smeds
Lace and Blade is an anthology series featuring stories with a particular look-and-feel -- a flavor of romantic, elegant, swashbuckling sword and sorcery, across a wide array of eras and cultures. (Alpennia is a perfect setting for this sort of tale.) If you want an collection of stories that's perfect for Valentine's day (or any day of the year, for that matter), check it out!
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Gifts Tell TruthTuesday, February 13, 2018 - 07:55
The submissions have all been read and sifted through, the contracts have been sent out and signed, and now it's time to announce the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast's 2018 original fiction line-up! When I finished the first read-though of submissions, I knew immediately that I had a problem: there were just too many good stories that I wanted to buy. Fortunately, I could solve this with an executive decision. Rather than buying two stories for a half-year trial run of the fiction project, I'd just go ahead and buy four to cover all the "fifth Saturday" episodes for the entire year. That will also give me more data to see whether and how I want to extend the fiction project in the future.
The first story will be airing at the end of March and I'm already in negotiations with one potential narrator. I haven't decided on the order of appearance for the whole season yet, but here are the selections in chronological order of setting:
- "Peaceweaver" by Jennifer Nestojko - In 6th century Denmark, one of the secondary characters from Beowulf comes home again, looking for a different type of peace than she once wove for her kingdom.
- "At the Mouth" by Gurmika Mann - In 10th century India, a temple dancer and a seamstress sort out how best to further each other's happiness.
- "Inscribed" by V.M. Agab - In 15th century Venice, Luca apprentices to her father in disguise as a young man, but Coletta's problem is more difficult to solve unless Luca takes a daring chance.
- "One Night in Saint Martin" by Catherine Lundoff - The 17th century Carribbean is full of spies, pirates, and tangled international politics--this story has them all, as well as romance!
I'm especially happy that after I'd identified the best stories I'd received, I found I also had a broad variety of time-periods, cultures, and types of story. We have young love and love returned to late in life. We have adventure and quiet friendship. We have women who transgress gender norms and those who find love within conventional structures. We have happy endings, bittersweet ones, and stories where the eventual end is yet unknown. I'm so excited to be able to bring these stories to my podcast listeners!
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LHMPMonday, February 12, 2018 - 07:00
Sexual activity has a long and creative history of being described and referred to by slang and euphemism. But when the source domain of the euphemism--the "literal" meaning--is an equally ordinary everyday action, the ambiguity creates problems of interpretation. And in a field like the study of historic same-sex relations, where there is a long tradition of going to some contortions to deny even the scraps of available evidence, euphemism has long been interpreted selectively depending on the genders of the participants. "They weren't, you know, sleeping together, they were just sleeping together."
This article examines one of those euphemisms in a context where both the wider use of the phrase and supporting evidence from the text argues for an unambiguously sexual interpretation. (The article also gives me a new historic text to try to track down.)
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LHMPFull citation:
Watt, Diane. 1997. “Read My Lips: Clipping and Kyssyng in the Early Sixteenth Century” in Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. Anna Livia and Kira Hall. New York, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-510471-4
Publication summary:
A collection of linguistics papers relating to queer and feminist theory. From a historic context, the coverage is somewhat shallow and oddly focused (most likely due to having been written by linguists rather than historians). In particular there are regular gaps in knowledge about this history of terminology, or confusion about linguistic transmission and equivalence across languages. I have only included the three papers with relevance to the Project.
Watt, Diane “Read My Lips: Clipping and Kyssyng in the Early Sixteenth Century”
[The following is duplicated from the associated blog. I'm trying to standardize the organization of associated content.]
Sexual activity has a long and creative history of being described and referred to by slang and euphemism. But when the source domain of the euphemism--the "literal" meaning--is an equally ordinary everyday action, the ambiguity creates problems of interpretation. And in a field like the study of historic same-sex relations, where there is a long tradition of going to some contortions to deny even the scraps of available evidence, euphemism has long been interpreted selectively depending on the genders of the participants. "They weren't, you know, sleeping together, they were just sleeping together."
This article examines one of those euphemisms in a context where both the wider use of the phrase and supporting evidence from the text argues for an unambiguously sexual interpretation. (The article also gives me a new historic text to try to track down.)
# # #
This article examines the context of the phrase “clippyng and kyssyng” that occurrs to describe physical interactions between the female protagonists in the early 16th century English translation of the tale of Yde and Olive (in the Huon of Bordeux cycle). The translation is from an early French text, but this article is specifically concerned with the 16th century English context.
Although “clipping” (hugging, embracing) and “kissing” could occur in non-sexual contexts generally without erotic implications, in the tale it is juxtaposed with the emperor’s reaction that, if the two individuals engaging in it are indeed both women (which is true, but an unproven accusation at this point in the tale), then what they are doing is “boggery” (buggery) and deserves the death penalty. The article summarizes the context of the story (for which, see items tagged with Yde and Olive) and discusses the general context of women crossdressing in religious and secular literature. In general, the disguise is a means to an end, especially one that inolves freeing oneself from female roles and hazards. But Watt considers Yde and Olive to stand outside this tradition to the extent that it overtly creates a context for homoerotic feelings and actions, especially Olive’s choice to continue as a loyal and loving wife after she discoveres Yde’s female identity.
“Clipping and kissing” are common as an activity in Middle English texts and both words can cover both sexual and non-sexual contexts. In heterosexual contexts the phrase can be used as a eupehmism for sexual intercourse. The actions occur in this tale in a context where physiology is not revealed--Yde’s identity as a woman is disclosed verbally later. But the emperor’s assignment of the word “buggery” makes it clear that he sees the clipping and kissing as sexual. At the time of the original French text (which also uses a form of the word buggery) the word buggery had implications of heresy as well as sodomy.
Watt discusses the oft-proposed idea that a lack of terminology for female same-sex relations indicates their non-existence. She notes the OED as a basis for the late entry (late 19th century) of the words “lesbian” and “sapphist” into English but then gives a nod to Emma Donoghue’s work that identifies earlier examples of both words. Watt indicates that no similar vocabulary survives in English from the 16th century but notes that texts such as Yde and Olive demonstrate that the concept of sex between women didn’t require specific terminology. As another example, she cites Brown’s work on the trial of Benedetta Carlini (early 17th century Italy) where a wide variety of language is used to refer to same-sex acts that--from the descriptions--are clearly sexual.
The artcile has a survey of European medieval and Rennaissance penalties for women’s same-sex activity but Watt notes the significant differences between continental and English legal traditions. She concludes with a discussion of how, based on the evidence, women’s same-sex relations were considered transgressive to the extent that the women were considered to be claiming male prerogatives, rather than for the sexual acts themselves.
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Sunday, February 11, 2018 - 11:00
I've gotten a little behind on the Book Bingo story schedule, as this post was meant to go up over a week ago. I need to work harder at these ficlets being easy off-the-cuff things! The most recent square for Jae's Lesbian Book Bingo was "doctors and veterinarians" so I got a little tangled up in researching the state of woman physicians in western Europe in the 1690s. ("Tangled up" as in, found a new reference book I didn't have time to hunt down for the story, but will now go after and then will need to write something else to use it.) For those who have grown attached to my pair of soldiers, I hope you won't mind that the stories are going to drift away from them for a while. It would be nearly impossible to hit all the themes with only a narrow set of characters! I'll be circling back to Martijn and Lena/Pieter later. For now, they provide the cross-over to some new characters.
The Lesbian Book Bingo challenge is a fun year-long communal reading project to fill bingo cards with various popular themes and tropes from lesbian fiction. There are prizes for completing rows and entire cards, as well as a chance to win books by participating in the blog posts. In addition to filling out my own card (4 squares so far!) and having my books featured as suggested reading, I'm playing along by writing one of these mini-stories for each square, all loosely connected in a historic setting (to prove that pretty much any story can be a historical story). And just to remind folks, although Daughter of Mystery is being featured for the "fantasy" square, my books hit a lot of the themes and you can use them for anything they fit.
- "The Mazarinette and the Musketter" (self-published novelette, see links below for information on all books) - LGBTQIA+ characters (bi women, trans man), historical fiction, you might possibly fit it into "women in uniform" since a Musketeer uniform is a key plot point.
- Daughter of Mystery (Alpennia #1) - friends to lovers, butch/femme (sort of), fantasy, historical fiction
- The Mystic Marriage (Alpennia #2) - LGBTQIA+ (one main character is demisexual), friends to lovers, age difference, fantasy, I think you could even use "workplace romance" since the romance develops in an alchemy lab, historical fiction
- Mother of Souls (Alpennia #3) - friends to lovers, fantasy, historical fiction, LGBTQIA+ (since both women are bi), but I'd rather people didn't use it for the "women of color" square because I'd prefer people to chose own-voices books for that in preference to mine
Besieged
I could tell when the gates were opened by the change in the sound of the crowd below in the town square. Early in the morning, the sight of Marshall Luxembourg’s relieving forces in the distance beyond the fortifications of the Grand Alliance had raised a muted cheer from the people of Montigny. The siege had left them too wearied for louder joy.
All through the day the noise of the battle had filtered past the town walls and even deep into this fortified tower from which Baron de Maricourt had led the defense. The sounds of the fighting had faded at last and now the streets were filled with the joyful shouts of our saviors. It was a consequence of my profession that behind the shouts I could only hear the groans of torn and wounded men and see blood and shattered limbs.
Luxembourg could have relieved us at any time he chose, but Montigny was no Mons or Namur, no important bone for the hounds to squabble over in a great show. We’d been left to hold for ourselves. Rather, de Maricourt and his people had. I had been caught up in the siege for a different reason entirely.
“What is it? I heard shouting.”
I turned from the narrow window that looked out on the square and rushed to Isabel’s side where she leaned on the doorway from the inner chamber, clutching the edges of her dressing gown together.
“What are you doing out of bed?” I demanded, softening my tone to tender chiding.
Isabel shook her head but she didn’t refuse my arm as I helped her across the small room to the cushioned seat in the window embrasure.
“I thought I heard the baby,” she said. “But then I realized the noise came from out in the streets.”
“You can trust the maids and the wetnurse to see to the baby.” And then I was sorry I’d said it, for Isabel’s mouth twisted. Not that a woman of her station would have been expected to nurse her own child, but expected and unable were two different matters. “You shouldn’t have been put though this at all,” I said fiercely. “De Maricourt should have sent you to safety in Reims or even Paris before this all began.”
Isabel took my hand and pressed it to her lips. “But I had you, Laura, so I knew all would be well. I had the best woman physician ever trained at Bologna. I had both you and Henri at my side and I knew my duty. I am where I was meant to be.”
There was no point in reminding her that I was one of the only women trained in Bologna in recent times, or that a good midwife could have done as much for her as I had. De Maricourt had decided his wife needed the best of care, and as I could receive no license in France, my skills lay fallow. But I had no complaints that fate had led him to my door, and me to her bedside. No complaints except for the unknown future, now that my skills were no longer needed. So many things were uncertain. How could I have the courage to face the possibility that Isabel and I would be parted forever?
I bent down and cupped her face in my hands and claimed her lips with my own. Isabel responded with an eagerness at odds with her frail form. She reached for me and I settled onto the cushion at her side, my arms finding a place between support and an embrace. There had been so few chances of late simply to enjoy each other’s presence.
We hadn’t expected the siege to last so long or the outcome to be so much in doubt. De Maricourt could see to it that his pregnant wife never went hungry even when the rest of us tightened belts or laced stays more closely, but he couldn’t shield her from the knowledge and guilt that he’d done so, or from the worry of what would happen if we were forced to surrender the town.
“You did more than your duty,” I said as we separated at last and I stood, offering my hands to help Isabel rise. “You gave de Maricourt a son—a healthy son—and now that you’ve done that, your duty is to get well yourself. So back to bed and rest.”
I couldn’t rest, though, not with what I knew lay outside the walls. So I called for one of the maids to help me change into a simple gown of black frieze, covered by an apron borrowed from the kitchen, and to pin my hair up under a linen cap. I still had my instruments and medicines, even if I had no license. And a battlefield forgave many transgressions.
* * *
Casualties within the town had been few today and addressed well before the gates were opened. I made my way against the flow of men and carts bringing supplies in for the townsfolk until I came to the open space before the walls. Tents were being erected on the broken ground that had been no man’s land the day before. The shelters where the wounded had been carried were easy enough to find from the sounds—and from the line of shrouded forms laid out behind them.
A man in the blue of Marshal Luxembourg’s guard stopped me at the entrance, looking suspiciously at my surgeon’s case.
“Who is that to be delivered to? I’ll have it taken in—this is no place for a woman.”
I stiffened my spine at looked him in the eye. “I am Madame Laura Alberti, Baron de Maricourt’s personal physician. I’ve come to help with the wounded.”
He disappeared for a few moments and returned, followed by a balding man wearing a blood-soaked apron.
“Madame, with all respect to de Maricourt, we haven’t time to waste with vapors at the sight of blood. There will be time enough to need help with the nursing when this butchery is done.”
Vapors. Did the man have no idea how much blood women dealt with every day? How closely a childbed could resemble a charnel house if matters went wrong? I kept my voice even. “I have been trained in surgery at the University of Bologna—”
He raised a hand to cut me off. “Madame, I haven’t the time. But perhaps they will be desperate enough for your services.” He gestured off to the other side of the broken ground where the remnants of the Alliance forces were gathering their own wounded, without even the benefit of a shelter against sun and wind. Without waiting for an answer, he disappeared back into the tent and the guard returned to a position that barred my way.
Well, a wounded man was a wounded man. I would help where I was permitted.
No one barred my path when I reached the field where the Alliance wounded were laid out in haphazard groups. There was no path to bar and no one with a moment free to do the barring. The groans of the men were a cacophony of Dutch, German, English, Spanish, and the more familiar French, but bullets and shattered bones needed no translation. I set to work with knife and saw, pressing into service as an assistant whoever stood nearby who seemed less injured than the others. Half of my patients died under my hands.
The other surgeons—or those acting as such—scarcely noted my presence except to point to where a pile of dirty linen was being torn into strips. As twilight turned to darkness, someone brought me a lamp. The ranks of the wounded were thinning as the dead were carried away in one direction and those who might live were taken up by their fellows to the meagre shelter of the prisoners’ camp.
Out at the edge of the thin lamp-light I’d noticed two patient figures, a wounded man half-propped by his companion with a bloody rag tied closely around one outstretched leg. The unhurt man’s air of resigned patience had argued against urgency when the ground had been full of groans and screens, but now I gathered my things and moved in their direction.
One of the other surgeons stopped me with a hand on my arm. “Don’t bother. He’s been refusing treatment ever since his fellow dragged him over here under protest. Save your skills for those that want them.”
I nodded thanks, but continued over to crouch beside the pair and opened my bag before starting to loosen the bandage.
The wounded man’s eyes fluttered open. He muttered something first in Dutch, I think. Seeing me, fear crossed his face and he changed to French. “No! No madame, let it be. Don’t touch me.”
I looked him over with a professional eye and a long day’s practice in the sort of hurts the battle had brought. He hadn’t the grayish cast of deep wounds or broken bones—not a musket ball then, or at least one spent before it hit. Perhaps the work of a blade, perhaps splinters from what a cannonball had struck.
I closed my bag and stood. “If the thought of a woman physician treating your wound is so distasteful you’d rather risk losing the leg when it turns putrid, the choice is yours.”
As I turned, I heard the other man talking rapidly, pleading. But all I could make out was the wounded man’s name: Martin. And then, with a scrambling movement, his companion was at my side, pulling at my sleeve and begging. I didn’t need any Dutch to guess the direction of his pleas.
The man…no, a boy really. The thought struck to my heart. Giovanni had been no older than this when he marched away so many years ago, though he’d seemed a man because I had only been a child. I remembered the feel of father’s hands on my shoulders, keeping me from running after him. But in truth he’d been little more than a child like me. A boy fallen on a battlefield such as this, never to return home. For the first time that day, the soldiers were more than broken flesh. A lump rose in my throat and I ruthlessly dismissed it. Fie on me for being what they’d warned me of: a weeping woman pretending to a man’s occupation!
I knelt down again at the man’s—Martin’s—side. “Be still and let me work.”
The crude bandage was cut off quickly. Martin protested again when I worked at the the fastenings of his breeches to expose the leg more plainly. Such modesty for a battleground! One might think he…ah, no. Not modesty alone!
I sat back on my heels looking him…her…in surprise. I’d heard of such things. Of women passing for a soldier. What could drive someone to such a life? The two watched me closely, frozen like cornered rabbits. Realization dawned. Both of them. Not boys, but not men either. Two comrades watching each other’s backs against the world. And for what? I saw how they looked at each other. Yes, that I could understand.
I looked around to see if anyone else was watching and Martin said in a quiet pained voice, “Please, madame.”
I returned to removing the breeches and gestured to the second soldier to move around to Martin’s far side to block any view from where the other surgeons were working, though I doubted anyone had a thought to spare beyond their own tasks.
With the leg laid bare the problem, too, was exposed. Centered in a smear of gore, a large splinter of wood from a gun carriage was driven deep into the muscle of the thigh. That gave me more hope. Extraction and cautery and a good chance it wouldn’t putrefy. I showed Martin’s companion how to hold her down. No amount of mere courage would carry her through what came next. Then I set to work.
* * *
Dawn was lightening the battlefield when I finally raised my head to see no more wounded to attend. There would still be those lying out in the field with no one to carry them in for treatment. Others might seek them out, but I had other duties to return to. I looked around, at the last, for the two female soldiers but they had been taken away with the other prisoners still capable of walking.
The image of them stayed with me when I returned to the fortress to strip off my bloody gown and scrub away the blood and dirt. It was impossible to keep the war entirely away from Isabel, but there was no need to bring its signs before her so clearly.
Isabel was sitting up in bed, having broken her fast on a far better meal than any of us had enjoyed in a month. She was holding the babe in her arms, but handed him away to the nursemaid when I entered.
“Oh, Laura! The told me you had gone out into the battlefield!”
I settled myself on the edge of the bed and reached for her hand. “Not the battlefield itself, only to help with the wounded outside the walls.” I thought of the worries that had plagued me. The fear that Isabel was convalescing too slowly. The expectation that I would be torn from her side now that my work was done. The hint of jealousy for her newborn son. They seemed such quiet, homely fears now.
“Let me tell you a story of courage,” I said to her. “Of great courage and of love.”
(copyright 2018 Heather Rose Jones, all rights reserved)
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PromotionSaturday, February 10, 2018 - 09:00
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 19b - Interview with Ellen Klages - Transcript
(Originally aired 2018/02/10 - listen here)
Heather Rose Jones: Today, the Lesbian Historic Motif Project is delighted to have Ellen Klages as a guest. Ellen’s fiction has included multiple finalists for the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, and has had wins in the Nebula and World Fantasy. Welcome to the show, Ellen!
Ellen Klages: Thank you.
H: So, one of the reasons I hoped to get you on the podcast is to talk about your novella, Passing Strange, which is something of a love-letter to mid-20th century lesbian culture in San Francisco, as well as being steeped in the geeky world of pulp sci-fi, with something of a magical twist. It also has an incredibly gorgeous cover. What inspired you to write Passing Strange?
E: I started writing what eventually become Passing Strange in 1977, so 40 years ago. I was just out of college, I had just moved to San Francisco and I fell completely in love with the city. I started looking into its history and I discovered the, sort of, nascent gay bar scene, which was Mona’s, which was, I think, the first lesbian bar on the west coast. Fortunately, my past self actually saved the files and I had written four scenes of a story whose working title was The ’39 Fair. And every time, they were typed, and when I got a computer, I entered them into a file, and every time I got a new computer, I would switch it over, and switch it over, and switch it over. So, for 40 years this story has been following me around with these four, unrelated scenes and these two characters of Emily Netterfield and Loretta Haskel, and that was kind of all I had. But I would find it every once in a while, when I was gutting a new computer and I would go through files and I would go, “You know, one of these days, I’m actually gonna write that story.” And then Jonathan Strahan emailed me and said, I’m an acquiring editor for Tor.com, they’re doing a novella line, would you like to write a novella. And I thought, “Sure! Don’t know what… Wait! I could write the San Francisco story!” And so, I pulled out these 40-year-old files and did a whole lot more research and fell in love with it again.
H: And I think I saw somewhere that you have a short story with the same character who does the map folding magic, which we’ll have to explain in a second.
E: There’s a character named Franny, whose last name is actually Travers, but you don’t know that in any of the stories. And, yeah, there’s a story called “Caligo Lane” that came out on Subterranean Online in 2014, that is a sequel to Passing Strange even though I hadn’t written Passing Strange yet, that explains in great deal just exactly how Franny’s magic works. And because it came out first, in the novella I don’t explain how Franny’s magic works, because I already did that. There’s six characters in the novella, three of them are from other stories, three of them are brand new.
H: So, why don’t we give a little synopsis of the story.
E: It takes place in 1940 in San Francisco. There are six characters, they’re all women, which people have remarked upon as if its extraordinary, which I suppose it kind of is…
H: Well, it won’t be extraordinary to my audience.
E: If it had been military SF and it was all guys, nobody would have blinked, but it’s six women. There’s Franny and Babs, who are a couple. Franny is something along the lines of a witch and Babs is a math professor at the University of California. There’s Emily Netterfield, who is the black sheep of a fairly wealthy family on the east coast, who is working as a night club singer in drag. There’s Loretta Haskel, who is an artist who draws covers for Weird Tales, or the Weird Tales equivalent, draws covers for the pulps. There’s Helen Young, who is an Asian-American, although at that time she was just an Oriental, who is a lawyer, and because she can’t any jobs as a lawyer because she’s Asian and she’s a woman, dances in a night club called Forbidden City. And then there’s Polly Wardlow, who is a British refugee, because it’s 1940, so there’s a war in the rest of the world, but not in the US. And Polly actually also appears in a story called “Hey Presto” that came out in, it’s in a couple of ‘year’s bests’ from 2014, but that’s Polly’s origin story. So, those are my main characters.
H: And one of them the magical elements in this story is this map folding magic that enables people to essentially teleport. It’s sort of an in passing “this thing just happens.”
E: It lets them teleport, but only within the city, because it doesn’t work… Franny hasn’t figured out how to make it work farther than about a mile, so what she does is she draws maps and then she folds them into origami. And imagine taking a map of the US and if you folded it one way, New York would be on top of San Francisco and you could just walk from one city to the other. And in essence, that’s how Franny’s magic works, although it’s a lot more complex than that is and involves… yeah, it’s more complicated.
H: Then another element… magical element in the story is the artwork, which…
E: And, well Haskel has, from the beginning of the story, and I’m just going to do an aside here that I’ve had a lot of people complain that there’s magic at the beginning and there’s magic at the end and it seems tacked on. And my view of magic is that, if you actually had magic, it would be like that platter that you keep in the cupboard over the stove that you only get down at Thanksgiving or Christmas Eve. You know, it’s not everyday china, you don’t use it every day, so it’s special. So, they don’t talk about it through the entire novella, although people that are expecting high fantasy are disappointed by the fact that it’s mainstream in the middle. It’s a mash-up story. It is about the pulps, it is noire, it is historical, it is queer, it is fantastic, it was magic realism, but it isn’t all of those at the same time. So, the other element of magic is that Haskel’s grandmother comes from, we will call it “The Old Country” and has given Haskel a necklace as a high school graduation present. And Haskel’s necklace actually appears in every single chapter and at the end you find out that Haskel’s necklace is more than a necklace and that it will, because she’s an artist, it becomes pigment that becomes a painting that gets them out of a gnarly situation. And I won’t say anymore than that because that would be a spoiler. But there are several different kinds of magic.
H: I want to talk about the historical aspects of the story, and I know that a lot of what you write is historical in some fashion, you have a wonderful set of, I don’t know if they’re YA or Middle Grade, The Green Glass Sea.
E: They’re 9 and up and “up” that I know of is 96, so yeah, they’re published as children’s books.
H: That are set around a young girl whose parents are working on the Manhattan Project during WWII.
E: Yes, and she actually shows up in Passing Strange. She does a cameo and Babs, Franny’s lover, is her aunt. So, somebody pointed out to me, after the fact, something that I hadn’t quite put together, which is that this now means that Green Glass Sea, which is a completely different mainstream historical fiction, now exists in a world where magic is real.
H: (Laughter)
E: So, these things are all interconnected, but yeah… Yeah, I love, I love the past. A lot of people thing that science fiction is always set in the future or on another planet and, for me, the future… I have no interest in the future because I don’t know what it’s going to be. It’s many forking paths. It could be anything. And I’m not particularly interested in speculating on one of the ways it could be, but I love going back and looking at the past and looking at what we know about the past and then trying to look around the corner at the stuff that didn’t get talked about, or didn’t get written down, or that was taken for granted at the time, or that we now take for granted, and trying to bring the readers who live in the present face to face with the realities of the past in a way that doesn’t feel like it’s really educational.
H: Yeah. Is there anything other than a general love of history that got you started writing historical stories?
E: I just love the past. I mean, I’ve always, ever since I was a kid, I would go to used bookstores and I would be drawn to the books, not the new books, but the older books. Flea markets, garage sales, I am drawn to things that existed before I was born and they just… you know, there’s something right about the colors of an old magazine or an old View Master reel or even old maps. So, since I was old enough to have an allowance, I have collected old stuff and everything from the past has a story. And I’m fascinated by the stories that didn’t get told.
H: So, I know that you’ve been very involved in lesbian culture yourself, but was there any particular challenge in writing lesbian characters in a historical era that you weren’t around for?
E: Yeah. 1940 is way before I was born. Most of the challenge… Well, there’s two challenges. One of them is not making their lives be extraordinary, because they aren’t. They are living ordinary lives but in a period in which their ordinary lives were illegal. Literally illegal. It was against the law to be gay. And trying to get that across to modern day readers, especially younger modern-day readers, who grew up in an era that is post-that, or at least in San Francisco, which is where I live. And the other challenge is trying to make the past come alive so that you feel like you’re getting the back-stage tour, like you’re not reading about history, you’re actually slipping through a little bit of time travel and going back and walking the streets and seeing what used to be there and what would have been. And a book part of the book is… There’s three settings, there’s Mona’s, which was a lesbian nightclub that was primarily for tourists? Which is why the police let it go, but it was also the only place in town where gay women could hang out and be themselves. And then there is the Chinese nightclub, the Forbidden City, where most of the performers were not actually Chinese. They were Japanese, they were Korean, they were Filipino, they were… one of them was Spanish. And then there’s the World’s Fair and a lot of people don’t know that San Francisco had a World’s Fair in 1939, they know about the New York World’s Fair. San Francisco actually built Treasure Island to have a World’s Fair in ’39 and ’40 to celebrate the opening the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge and then they were going to turn it into San Francisco International Airport. And then a war happened the Navy took it over. So, Treasure Island is still out there, but there’s no trace of the fair. And I have always found that particular fair just to be like, the most romantic thing…
H: I thought some of the buildings were still there.
E: No, there’s nothing. There’s one hangar and there’s a part of one fountain. And there used to be a Treasure Island museum, but they didn’t have any funding, so everything is boxed up in a warehouse someplace. But I have always, since I moved to San Francisco, found the idea that this really uninteresting island that’s two miles out in the bay, that the Bay Bridge goes through, that you pass through, had this fantasy land in it. And one of the things that I wanted to do was work as many fantasy elements and some science fiction elements into a mainstream story. So, it really was called “The Magic City,” Treasure Island was, the Fair was, and it was full of things that looked like they came out of something Arthur Rankin would have illustrated, or the cover of a science fiction pulp. You know, these buildings that would never exist in real life and larger than life stuff. And so I wanted to try to bring that to life, mostly for myself, because boy I really have always wanted to go there and, of course, it was gone 15 years before I was born, but also so the readers could go to this magical place that no longer exists.
H: Yeah, on the theme of time-travel as it were, I think you said this was your first story that was published, “Time Gypsy”? Which has an actual over time-travel element and is, again, connecting the modern lesbian experience with the 50s.
E: Yeah, that one is set in ’57 and it was my first story. And it got nominated for a Nebula and a Hugo, so apparently, I knew what I was doing. And again, the science fiction element is very slight. I have enough time-travel, I mean I read Stephen Hawking, figured out a way that there could possibly be time-travel.
H: And, as I understand it, it’s a modern physicist, I think?
E: Yeah, it’s a PhD in physics at Cal.
H: Who travels back in time to meet her hero or something and, why don’t you give a brief synopsis.
E: It’s a woman named Carol McCullough who has a PhD in the history of science, and she’s called into the dean’s office and said, “You know about this crackpot scientist from the 50s, Sara Baxter Clarke.” And she’s like, “Yeah, I did my PhD thesis on her…” And she’s worried that she’s like, going to lose her job because crackpot physicist. And he basically says, “Well, she was right. There is time-travel. We figured out most of what she was doing, but her last paper was lost when she died in this tragic accident the day, she was supposed to present this paper. We figured out enough that we can get you back there, but we can only do it once because the energy requirement is… and we think her paper can solve that. So, we want you to go back, make friends with her, get the paper and bring it back to us.” So, she goes back, meets Sara Baxter Clarke, they fall in love because it turns out that Sara Baxter Clarke was gay and had a beard as a boyfriend. Then they decide not to send the paper back and it gets very convoluted as they plan the accident that everybody knows is what killed her, but it doesn’t and it is, yeah. It was so much fun to write, and it was my first story. So, it’s really exciting. And it does harken back to a lot of the themes of Passing Strange. Of, really it was not ok to get caught being gay in the 40s, or the 50s, or the 60s, or, depending on where you lived, the 70s, 80s, or 90s.
H: Uh huh. Yeah. So, I know that a lot of your books recently have been more aimed at the YA audience. Have you ever done queer characters for YA or are the two streams not really meeting?
E: I’ve got two novels that came out ten years ago that are middle grade and I just finished one… Some of the characters overlap, so if you want to find gay themes in the middle grade books, they’re there. If you don’t, they don’t jump out at you. The only novels I have ever written are middle grade novels for kids. They’re also historical fiction. Other than time… well, there’s usually women characters… Ok, there’s women characters in all of my short fiction. There are a lot of gay characters, but I don’t make a big deal out of it because I don’t feel that’s my job. It’s like, there are two women, they’re lovers, and this is what happens. So, Passing Strange was the first time since “Time Gypsy” that I think I’ve written a long piece that was overtly, overtly queer. And it’s not… I mean, eventually some grad student is going to put everything I’ve written together and find themes and that will amuse me, but they’re not separate, I don’t write under a different name, they’re just sort of out in the suburbs versus the stories that take place in the city.
H: Uh huh. So, would you like to let our listeners know where they could find information about your books online or do you have social media they could follow if they wanted?
E: If you’re on Twitter, I am @eklages, on Facebook, I think I’m just Ellen Klages. Passing Strange came out from Tor.com in January of 2017, you know, this is December, it’s the end of the year and a lot of very, very good things have come out this year. But you can go to Tor.com, your local, any bookstore that carries a decent collection of science fiction and fantasy, would either have it or be able to order it. You can go to the usual online places and, if you want a signed copy, contact Borderlands books in San Francisco, because they’re 10 minutes from my house and they will call me, and I will drive down and sign copies and then they will mail them off to you.
H: Yeah, I’ll put all these details in the show notes to make it easy for people. So, thank you so much for sharing your time with us here at the Lesbian Historic Motif Project.
E: Oh, you’re welcome. Thank you so much for having me.
Show Notes
A series of interviews with authors of historically-based fiction featuring queer women.
In this episode we talk about:
- The long incubation for the ideas that became Passing Strange
- Lesbian culture in mid-century San Francisco and the San Francisco World’s Fair on Treasure Island
- The hidden interconnectedness of Ellen’s novels
- The love of historic objects and texts
- Historical fiction as “time travel” for the reader
- Books mentioned
- Passing Strange by Ellen Klages
- “Caligo Lane” by Ellen Klages (originally published in Subterranean Online, Winter 2014, available in the collection Wicked Wonders Tachyon Publications, 2017)
- “Hey Presto” by Ellen Klages (originally published in the anthology Fearsome Magics ed. by Jonathan Strahan, 2014, available in the collection Wicked Wonders Tachyon Publicaitons, 2017)
- The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages
- “Time Gypsy” by Ellen Klages (originally published in Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction, edited by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel (Overlook Press, 1999), also available in the collection Portable Childhoods (Tachyon Publications, 2007))
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
- Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
- RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
- Twitter: @LesbianMotif
- Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
- The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon
Links to Heather Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com
- Email: Heather Rose Jones
- Twitter: @heatherosejones
- Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)
Links to Ellen Klages Online
- Website: Ellen Klages
- Twitter: @eklages
- Facebook: Ellen Klages
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LHMPFriday, February 9, 2018 - 10:00
“The Price of Meat” is a horror novelette set in a mildly alt-historical London with casual inclusion of both female and male same-sex couples while definitely not being a romance in format. The setting and characters have the feel of being spun off of an existing alternate history setting--as if we’re expected to be familiar with the two men and their backstory, and with the points of historical divergence established economically in the opening paragraph--but the author indicates otherwise. It doesn’t in any way detract from the story, which is complete in itself, but I guess I was a bit disapointed that there weren’t any other stories about the daring Joanna Oakley and the imperiled heiress Arabella Wilmot waiting for me out there.
From a realistically-sketched Victorian madhouse to a more industrialized version of Sweeney Todd’s *ahem* food service supply chain in a lawless London underworld neighborhood, there’s just enough horror to keep the reader squeamish without going too far for my sensibilities. (I personally don’t care much for body horror. There was a smidge of that, but not too graphic.)
I’ve been aware of K.J. Charles as a celebrated writer of gay male historical fiction and fantasy for quite some time and enjoyed having this excuse to try her work where it intersected with my own interests. The writing is excellent and the historic setting feels solid and inhabited. It makes me jealous that she doesn’t write more stories focusing on female characters.
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ReviewsTuesday, February 6, 2018 - 07:59
My friend Karen periodically holds a "backyard writing retreat" for a small circle of friends. The idea is to set aside the day for actual writing, not chit-chat (though we do some of that) or web surfing (though that happens too) or getting caught up on ancillary tasks (yup, check). So for this past Sunday's writing retreat, I committed to actually starting the revisions on Floodtide, which has been "fermenting" in messy first draft since...oh my goodness, since before last year's Worldcon? I'd have to check.
What do I mean by "messy"? In addition to a number of significant changes to specific plot points based on discussions as I wrote, there are still a lot of placeholders (**insert the conversation Roz has with the housekeeper about not getting her back pay when she's fired**). There are duplications where I still have both (or more) versions of what I drafted (#1 Nan sneaks out and tells Roz how they got caught; #2 the footman who's been macking on Nan comes out and tells Roz he got her fired; #3 Roz is left completely in ignorance of how they got caught and why Nan didn't get fired alongside her until a later point in the story). There are many characters to name (Roz's aunt back in Sain-Pol to whom she was sort-of-apprenticed to learn the laundry trade and who used her connections in Rotenek to get Roz her position...and for that matter I have no idea yet what Roz's surname is, and the housekeeper needs a different name because it's too similar to an existing character in the sereis). And all that is just in the first scene.
Sunday I started by making an official backup file of the draft-as-is (although Scrivener and TimeCapsule both have backups--I'm just a belt-and-suspenders-and-superglue sort of person). Then I skimmed through the entire file deleting or moving around editorial notes as necessary, stripping out the timeline framework from where it overlapped with Mother of Souls, deleting the files for scenes that never got any content, highlighting sections that I know for certain need to be entirely changed, moving some scenes around that I hadn't been sure where to place when I wrote them, and adding some reminders for things I glossed over in the first draft (e.g., Liv has a service dog that needs to be included in the casual description a lot more, not just when it's doing something plot-relevant).
Currently the file is 89,000 words. That's significantly shorter than any of the previous books (which all ended close to 150,000 words) but may actually be more than I end up with, if I'm ruthless. Floodtide is meant to be different in structure: more of a YA story, single point of view, and able to be read independently of the existing series. So the wordcount needed to follow multiple primary points of view, or to bring the reader up to speed on What Has Gone Before aren't going to drive the length (as much).
I've already made some changes to the original plan in support of that. For example, originally I had included Anna Monterrez as part of the "group of teenagers" that I wanted to focus the story on, but Anna really isn't part of that age cohort, as the overall series has evolved. She's one of the adults, for all practical purposes. And every time I got to a point in the outline where originally I thought she'd be intersecting the plot of Floodtide, it just didn't work. There was no plot-based reason for her to be present in Roz's life, and setting up who she was and what she was doing there would have taken the plot off sideways. She'll get mentioned tangentially in a couple of places, but she isn't on stage. (So some of the key things that are going on in Anna's life during this period are going to go into a shorter story focused entirely on her that primarily parallels the time-frame of Mistress of Shadows.)
One of the main things I need to clearly set up, in terms of structure, is exploding any sort of reader expectations that Floodtide is a "romance" in structure. And that's going to be hard, because my publisher has this notion that books need to be framed as romances to get people to read them. Never mind the grief I've gotten from readers who went into the books expecting the primary, dominant plot to be a HEA romance and deciding they were badly written books because that wasn't what they got.
Roz starts off being unwillingly separated from her girlfriend. Being a pragmatic (and red-blooded) sort, she gets over it and falls in love again...with near-disastrous consequences. She runs into her original girlfriend once more and they definitely do not get back together. She has a lot of interactions with another character that might end up romantic if this were a romance novel, but it never goes in that direction. And the primary emotional relationship she develops over the course of the book is not (currently) romantic and teaches her some important things about the breadth of possible relationships one can have in one's life and how not everything needs to be about pants-feelings. At the end of the book, Roz has a number of very strong bonds with people of rather different types, but none of them are (currently) erotic and she's ok with that for the moment. How do I set readers up to see that as a happy ending?
That's what I mean by "messy", from the trivial to the over-arching.
What's my plan? I'd thought that I needed to go through and layer in lots of editing notes so I wouldn't lose track of things, but as I skimmed though the file, I could feel the future structure coalescing under the current surface. I think I can just wing it as far as that goes. So my plan is to start from the very beginning and simply rewrite from start to finish. Not "rewrite" in the sense of opening a new file, but going through each and every bit of text and treating it all as mutable. The clay is there, but I'm not quite ready to fire up the wheel. I think this is still the stage of wedging and kneading. But I can see the shape of the pot already.
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FloodtideMonday, February 5, 2018 - 07:00
I’ve interleaved a fair amount of criticism and corrections inside my summary of this article, simply because I feel that the material involves so many gaps and oversights that it moves from “flawed” to “misleading”.
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LHMPFull citation:
Bonnet, Marie-Jo. 1997. “Sappho, or the Importance of Culture in the Language of Love” in Queerly Phrased: Language Gender, and Sexuality, ed. Anna Livia & Kira Hall. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-510471-4
Publication summary:
A collection of linguistics papers relating to queer and feminist theory. From a historic context, the coverage is somewhat shallow and oddly focused (most likely due to having been written by linguists rather than historians). In particular there are regular gaps in knowledge about this history of terminology, or confusion about linguistic transmission and equivalence across languages. I have only included the three papers with relevance to the Project.
Bonnet, Marie-Jo “Sappho, or the Importance of Culture in the Language of Love”
This article looks at French historical terminology for women who loved women to consider whether changes in the prevalent terminology reflected social shifts in attitudes toward such women, on the basis that “naming grants recognition”. Unfortunately the article is deeply flawed by unfamiliarity with earlier examples of some terms, and by overlooking terms that were as common as the ones considered (if not more so). This results in conclusions based on faulty premises.
For example, the author fails to consider Brantôme’s 16th century use of “lesbienne” in the modern sense and identifies only “tribade” as being in pre-modern use in French, dating it only to the mid 16th century. She entirely ignores the distribution of “fricatrice” and “fricarelle”.
When considering language deriving from Sappho and Lesbos, she mistakes iconicity with causation, calling Sappho “the founder of lesbian love”. She considers the early absence of terminology derived from Sappho to be due to patriarchal suppression of the idea of egalitarian female same-sex love.
The author is also unfamiliar with the complex semantic history of “sodomy” and related terms and erroneously claims that there is “no specific term for women’s [same-sex] sexual practice in the Middle Ages”. She views the medieval church as uninterested in women’s same-sex behavior unless there is appropriation of male attributes (ignoring penitential evidence for that interest).
She attributes to Henri Estienne the first use in French of “tribade” and see this as a consequence of the revival of interest in Greek and Latin texts (as opposed to reflecting a shift from Latin to French for the types of records discussing such topics). She seems to accept at face value the claims by writers such as Estienne that displaced lesbian relationships into the classical era, asserting that such behavior in the 16th century was novel and unheared of. Rather than tracing the continued use of derivations of Greek/Latin “tribade” through the ages, she considers it a Latin invention (from Greek roots) with no Greek antecedent. And--noting that all the classical citations of the word “tribade” are from male authors, in combination with the absence of Sappho-based terminology, interprets this as a specific preference for male antecedents for sexual models. While a preference for male sources is quite possibly true, she overlooks medieval and Renaissance references to Sappho in the context of same-sex love, which would contradict this interpretation. This curious blindness also appears when she quotes Brantôme extensively while failing to note that he contradicts her claim that “lesbienne” was a later invention.
Brantôme’s discussions of lesbian love make it clear he considered it a “harmless game”, but she notes that women who made more transgressive life choices, such as marrying women in male disguise (see e.g., Montaigne) were punished more harshly. In this context, she considers that the focus on condemning only the “active” sexual partner and the alleged preference for the term “tribade” (which she sees as reinforcing an active/passive distinction) was a deliberate program to undermine a hypothetical egalitarian same-sex love associated with Sappho.
The author considers the changing dictionary definitions of “tribade” during the 18th century to reflect an ongoing philosophical debate around the meaning of the term and sees the driver of these changes as the rise of socially and culturally elite women who openly expressed their passion for othr women. [It seems odd to me that a linguist would treat dictionary entries as a reflection of contemporary usage and debate, rather than being conservative, prescriptive sources.] She considers expressions of passionate friendship in the 18th century as presumed to indicate sexual relationshps. She views the French revolution as constituting a cultural break between Renaissance culture and 19th century women who led a new wave of sexual openness that shifted into decadence and scandal. George Sand’s Lelia is presented as a turning point.
The author attributes the modern sense of “lesbienne” to Charles Baudelaire in the mid-19th century, suggesting that it was the association of the word with decadence and damnation that made it acceptable for general use (by men, presumably). Unfortunately this theory is undermined by the documented earlier use of the word as far back as the 16th century. She reviews lesbian terminology that has connotations focusing on the absence of men, such as “anti-homme” in L’Espion Anglais and “anandrine” in Revolutionary-era literature, and compares these terms to the root senses of “virgo” and “parthenos”. And finally, the author traces the rise of the word “homosexual” in parallel with the medicalization of sexuality in the early 20th century.
The article cites an early example of a prosecution for cross-dressing that I don’t think I’ve seen published elsewhere, so I thought I’d quote it here. It appears to refer to two separate events and there is no indication that there were sexual transgressions involved.
“In the thirteenth century, two women were burned at Péronne by Robert le Bougre for having porté l’habit d’homme (worn men’s cothing).” [Cited in the notes as: “These events ocurred between 1235 and 1238, notes Michèle Bordeaux, Professeur de Droit at the University of Nantes, to whom I am endebted for providing me with this information.”]
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