Susan Stinson

Hello, friends. It's been more than a year since I've posted here on the newsletter on my website. But since the Twtter community I loved is splintering under the thumb of a random billionaire, I wanted to be sure that you all know where to find me.  Here, of course, if I still have your correct email.  And for social media: 

Here I am on Mastodon

@susanstinson@universeodon.com

This is a new account. I'm just now learning how to use it, but I'm enjoying it. 

Here I am on Facebook

I've had a fair number of phishing attempts on my Facebook account, so I can be a little slow to add people back on there. Even if I know you, it's hard to be sure if someone has taken your photo, set up a false account, and is trying to scam people with it. Maybe drop me a note in the message function if you'd like be mutual friends there? 

There's so much else to say, but that's enough for now. Happy winter! 

The amazing Alison Bechdel gave a shout-out to Martha Mooday in Elle.com's book column.  She picked it as the book with the best opening line, and wrote something really gorgeous  about it.  "The first sentence is magnificent in the way it's a microcosm of the whole book, as well as a glimpse at the way Stinson writes so beautifully about fat bodies..."  That gives me an enormous amount of joy.  The whole list is full of books I love. 

Everyone should check out Alison's new book The Secret to Superhuman Strength, too! 

Field Notes by novelist Christopher Brown is a wonderful every week, rich with observations and insights from wandering the urban edgelands of Austin, Texas. I loved this May Day issue, which includes one of my favorite true stories from seventeenth century New England: the story of Thomas Morton and his wild Maypole party that got his whole settlement shut down.  It's a great moment to use as a departure to imagine what New England would have been like if they had stayed. Plus, a turte laying her eggs! And all!  Field Notes is very much worth subscribing to -- I wouldn't miss a Sunday.  

"I want writers at every point of their career to know that they can do this. It is possible to write work that no one except you and a few other pockets of literary adventurers have even dreamed of wanting to read."

"Freedom," a new craft essay, is up at Poets & Writers. This is third of four essays. 

My new short essay "In Praise of Italics" is up at Poets & Writers.  It is about the erotics and queerness of italics.    Very much inspired by the inimitable Elizabeth McCracken and her very different opinions about italics as expressed on Twitter. 

Here is "Body in the Mirror"

"...it took participation in grassroots feminism and reading great poets (for me, Gertrude Stein and Walt Whitman) before I could find my belly with my hands and write that it was soft to the touch."

It is the first in a series of four essays that will be appearing each Monday at the Poets&Writers website.  This one is about a writing exercise that helps writers be more connected to the bodies in their work.  It's also a story about how I started writing the essays and poems in Belly Songs: in celebration of fat women.

I love these author questions by Briallen Hopper at Killing the Buddha. They were posted for Valentine's Day, which is so lovely!  Killing the Buddha: 11 Questions About Martha Moody

To mark the anniversaries we are all facing, I just revised and added a little a passage from my paper journal of just over a year ago. Leafing through it, I see that I was writing there last year more than I remembered. Here it is:

The wildness of loneliness. The tenacity of communion. Solomon Stoddard thought that communion was a converting ordinance. Jonathan Edwards lost his church over an attempt to reserve it to those who could give spoken testimony of experiences of grace.

Once I took communion with my beloved friend Lynne at MCC San Francisco, where she -- who has studied, thought, and noted so much about that church's history, -- told me, they had decided that anyone could come with those they love and be held and be kissed, with the blood and the body, the bread and the wine.
I think of loaves and fishes, with fishes in their own worlds, own times, spawning upriver, pulled by the smell of the young of their kind slowly maturing in the mud of the banks. Let me love that well. Let me be pulled by the smell.

The prayer of the journal is holding.

My feelings surge. I need to contain them, to limit, and also to release, uncover, and dance with my ambitions, fears, loneliness, grief, longings, joy. Bodily soundness and weakness or not. Telling stories have saved me more than once, including my telling of them, and will save me again..

Long, gold socks I gave my mother that she gave me back. The women of the arthritis aqua aerobics class. Old women, happy to see me. Now, a year later, Maura, the last one to help and hug me, gone.
Praise the day. Do the work. Be in the day.

Judith Katz wrote a wonderful review of Martha Moody in Lamda Literary Review. "Susan Stinson's substantial and delicious historical novel, Martha Moody, has been reissued by Small Beer Press, and it is certainly cause for celebration."  It's also a great history of lesbian and feminist publishing.  

Now there's a link at Book Moon Books so that if you've got a US mailing address, you can get almost all of my books, including Belly Songs. What you do is, click the button to order Martha Moody, then write in "Belly Songs" or "Venus of Chalk" or "Spider in a Tree." Then, you'll get the book and the money goes to me. It works that way because these small and micro press books aren't on the distributor's website, but Gavin from Book Moon came to my stairs and fetched the books, so I know they are there. (Fat Girl Dances With Rocks isn't available because it's out of print and I don't have copies.)