Sassafras Patterdale's Blog, page 25

I've been keeping a secret for the past couple of weeks, and folks who know me know that I'm not very good with secrets, but now it's time to spill the beans (Jack's magic beans of course)   This afternoon I signed a contract with Ravenous Romance to edit a new anthology titled 'Leather Ever After' BDSM retellings of classic fairy tales!   This book has been a bit of a secret dream of mine for a little while now, and when the opportunity presented itself to edit the book well, lets just say it just seemed like a fairy tale ending  The call for submissions (see below) is open until August 1st so please forward widely and start writing!  You know you want to tell me a story!

Call For Submissions:

Leather Ever After

BDSM retellings of classic fairy tales

Editor: Sassafras Lowrey

Publisher: Ravenous Romance 

Deadline: August 1, 2012

Payment: $25 plus a copy of the anthology

Story Length: 2,500 – 5,000 words

Once upon a time, in a dungeon far, far away, you were summoned to join the quest for the hottest and kinkiest retellings of your favorite fairy tales. I'm seeking hot, well-written stories about bondage, power play, sadism and masochism. Think dragon fire-play,  princesses in bondage,  evil step mothers, and happy endings too good to be true. Give me fantasy, or show me the magic all around us, when Prince Charming wins the leather contest with the help of his fairy drag-mother,  Rapunzel is entangled in hair suspension and the little mermaid edgeplays with knives. I'm looking for a strong literary voice and characters with a a diversity of race, sexual orientations and gender identities/expressions.  All characters must be over 18.   It's time to write a new ending to your favorite bedtime story.

Submission Guidelines: Email submissions in Times New Roman 12 point black font Word document (.doc) with pages numbered of 2,500-5,000 words to  [email protected] . Please include your legal name (and pseudonym if applicable), short 50 word or less bio in the third person, mailing address, email, and title of the piece as part of your document.

About the editor: Sassafras Lowrey is an international award winning queer author and artist who came into a gutterpunk leather community a decade ago. Sassafras is the editor of the two time American Library Association honored and Lambda Literary Award Finalist Kicked Out. Sassafras' first novel, Roving Pack, will be released autumn 2012, an excerpt of which earned hir an Honorable Mention in the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund for Fiction. Ze tours to colleges,and community organizations across the country facilitating workshops that support LGBTQ and Leather people in telling their stories. Sassafras lives in Brooklyn, New York with hir Daddy, two dogs, and two kitties. You can learn more about Sassafras and hir work at www.PoMoFreakshow.com

I'm still flying just a little bit from the magic that was Queer Memoir: LEATHER last weekend here in NYC. I've organized a lot of events and each holds a special place in my heart but there was something truly extraordinary for me about this particular event. I realized in the days leading up to the event that although I've been involved in leather community for a decade this was the very first event that I've actually organized.  You can read more about the event itself and my reflections of it on a guest post at Leatherati and view the two incredible hours of storytelling online at Write Here, Write Now

I'm so excited to be parting with the organization Live Out Loud next week to via the magic of  SKYPE and the internet to  be going to vist the GSA at Clackamas High School where I graduated from ten years ago this spring. I've never had much interest in anything like a high school reunion, but I'm thrilled about the opportunity to visit the students currently involved with the GSA.  See, 10 years ago I was a founding member of that GSA, the first one that the school had ever had.  We fought administration for the right to have it, and dealt with the harassment and violence in the hallways from our classmates and threats of shutdown from parents who believed we were "leading kids down the path to hell."  I'm profoundly proud of that first LGBTQ organizing work that I did a decade ago which is at the root of all the work I do today.   Really looking forward to meeting the students in the GSA and will be sure to update everyone on what the experience of being back at Clackamas High School was like!  

I cannot even begin to describe how excited I am to be guest curating an evening of Queer Memoir, NYC's only LGBTQ storytelling series and to have it be Leather adds a whole nother layer of excitement and importance for me on a deep personal level as well as an artist.   On March 3rd I've brought together some awesome voices to share stories about Leather as special Queer Memoir benefit for Toni Amato's Write Here, Write Now!!!  The evening is going to be filled with kickass stories and don't forget your cash at home, because we'll even have a bake sale!!!

RSVP on Facebook or Fetlife !!!

Bios for Storytellers:

Sara Vibes a black, polyamorous, queer, kinky, dandy, macho femme princess born and raised in New York City. She is The 25th International Ms Leather 2011 and an active member in The Leather, BDSM, Poly, and LGBT communities in New York City and beyond. She has taught at Playhouse in Baltimore, Dark Odyssey, and International Mr. Leather and many other events and places during her title year. She will also be a contributor of the Perverts of Color Anthology and Salacious Magazine. Her mission is to make sex education accessible to everyone. She hopes to rip the veil off of the shame surrounding sex and sexuality through self love and exploration with people that care about each other.

Sinclair Sexsmith runs the award-winning personal online writing project Sugarbutch Chronicles: The Gender, and Relationship Adventures of a Kinky Queer Butch Top at sugarbutch.net. With work published in various anthologies and websites, including Take Me There: Trans and Genderqueer Erotica, she is the guest editor of Best Lesbian Erotica 2012, and her first full-length erotica anthology, Say Please: Lesbian BDSM Erotica, will be published by Cleis Press in April 2012. Mr. Sexsmith writes, teaches, and performs focusing on the subjects of sex, gender, and relationships. More information on her at mrsexsmith.com.

KELLI DUNHAM is a ex-nun, genderqueerious stand-up nerd comic and author of four books of humorous non-fiction, including two children's books being used by Sonlight conservative home schooling association in their science curriculum. She has appeared on Showtime, the Discovery Channel and was once asked to emcee a livestock auction. Her website is kellidunham.com. She is the co-founder, with Genne Murphy, of Queer Memoir. Her hilarious new family-secret revealing show, Normal at Nite: Good Times & Family Matters with Perfect Strangers (a collaboration with R Eric Thomas) is debuting February 18th at NYC's Stonewall Inn.

Ignacio Rivera aka Papí Coxxx identifies as a Queer, Trans, gender-fluid, polyamorous, kinky, Black-Boricua. Ignacio, who prefers the gender-neutral pronoun "they," is a lecturer, activist, wanna-be-filmmaker, sex educator, sex worker, and performance artist, sharing spoken word, one-person shows, and storytelling internationally. Their work has appeared in ColorLines, Ebony, Yellow Medicine Review and in their chapbooks, Las Alas, co-authored by Maceo Cabrera Estévez; Ingridients; and Thoughts, Rants and What Some Might Call Poetry. A proud mom of a 21 year-old daughter, Ignacio is the recipient of a Marsha A. Gómez Cultural Heritage Award from LLEGÓ: The National Latina/o Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Organization

They are also the founder of Poly Patao Productions (P3), which is dedicated to producing sex-positive workshops, performances, educational opportunities and events that are specially geared toward queer women, transgender, multi-gender, gender queer, gender-non-conforming and gender variant folx of color.

Ignacio has been facilitating workshops, doing lectures and creating events for kinky, kinky-curious Queer/Trans POC's and their white queer and trans allies for over a decade. http://polypataoproductions.com/

Emily Millay Haddad is an independent filmmaker, writer, director, activist and media professional living and working in Brooklyn, New York. She had the words to call herself a "feminist" when she was five, a "white girl" when she was nine, a "lesbian" when she was 17, a "bisexual" shortly after that, and a "queer" when she was 19. At 20, she was "polyamorous;" at 21, she learned about "kiki" dykes in the butch/femme spectrum of 1950s dyke bars and finally had a word for her gender. By 24, she had the words for "kinky" and "switch." And at 27, she learned the hard way that being "working class" was more than just her history or an economic label. She brings all these words and many more, as well as the life experiences they inadequately describe, to her labor and her yearning as an artist and a lover.

Sassafras Lowrey is an international award winning queer author, artist and activist and has been involved in leather community for nearly a decade. Sassafras' prose have been included in numerous anthologies and ze tours to colleges, universities and community centers across the country facilitating workshops that support LGBTQ/leather people in telling their stories. Sassafras lives in Brooklyn, New York with hir Daddy. You can learn more about Sassafras at www.PoMoFreakshow.com

Since 2001,  Write Here Write Now has been dedicated to providing safe, supportive, and financially accessible services and spaces for   LGBTQQIA people in the Boston (metro) and Western Massachusetts area.  WHWN also serves national and international communities through the use of the internet and other electronic and social media.  Because members of the LGBTQQIA community are often marginalized and at risk, especially young LGBTQQIA people, many of the traditional forms of literary support and development are not accessible to these writers. Write Here Write Now offers a variety of writing classes and resources. The backbone of these offerings is a series of weekly creative writing workshops based on contemporary generative writing models. From this starting point, the offerings have expanded to include dozens of craft, publication, and performance focused classes and workshops.All of these services are offered on a sliding scale with no writer turned away for lack of funds.  Many of the participants might not otherwise have had the opportunity to study the craft of writing in a safe and supportive community of peers.

On Monday I announced the autumn release of my novel ‘Roving Pack’  huge thanks to the tremendous supportive community response I’ve received!!!!  Since then KD Diamond whose doing the cover art from the book has been showing me updated drafts of the art!!!  I’m just in awe of the way she’s been able to capture the feel of the time and place this book is set in!  Here’s a sneak peek at a more polished draft of the cover!

On Monday I announced the autumn release of my novel 'Roving Pack'  huge thanks to the tremendous supportive community response I've received!!!!  Since then KD Diamond whose doing the cover art from the book has been showing me updated drafts of the art!!!  I'm just in awe of the way she's been able to capture the feel of the time and place this book is set in!  Here's a sneak peek at a more polished draft of the cover!

For the last couple of years I have been writing a novel based (not so) loosely on my experience as a trans fag growing up in a queer youth center.  Editing Kicked Out was one of the most incredible experience I ever had and it was also a very trying and difficult time for me artistically. When the anthology released I took a year off of major projects to focus on promoting Kicked Out, but also just to write for the sake of writing and  as cheesy as it sounds to fall back in love with the art.  During this year an old friend from my crusty punk days became very sick – she and I began trading text messages little 160 character stories about the crazy stunts we pulled back in the day and what our world was like.  I fought it for a while – these weren't the stories I wanted to write, and yet they grabbed me in a chokehold and wouldn't let me get away.  By the beginning of 2011 I submitted to the stories and admitted to myself that these stories would be my next book.

Roving Pack is the ragged dangerous edge of queerness. Set in an underground world of homeless queer teens the stories follow the daily life of Click a straight-edge (XXX) transgender kid searching for community, identity, and connection amidst chaos. As the novel unfolds we meet a pack of newly sober gender rebels creating art, family and drama in dilapidated punk houses and youth centers across Portland, Oregon.  Roving Pack offers fast-paced in-your-face accounts of leather, sex, hormones, house parties, and protests. But, when Click's gender fluidity takes an unexpected turn the pack is sent reeling….

I spent the better part of the last year querying this novel to publishers and agents there were flat out rejections and also positive nibbles. Traditional-non-traditional/independent publishers and agents have been reluctant to take on this project. Ultimately what became clear was that the stories were too dangerous. Specifically, the gender, and  leather content needed toning down to make this book palatable enough for a publisher to trust it would be profitable enough to publish. The success of Kicked Out got the query for the this novel read, but Roving Pack is not Kicked Out. If Kicked Out is (as many have called it) groundbreaking, then Roving Pack is edgeplay in the purest sense.

'Roving Pack' is the novel I've spent the last decade getting the nerve up to write.  I spent the first part of those ten years living the world I'm now translating to the page. It is profoundly important to me that I do justice to the queer gutterpunk world at the turn of the  21st century that saved my life, beat me black and blue in the ways I needed, and ultimately raised me up in every way imaginable.

I have no doubt that I could have changed the plot, made the characters safer and easily had a publisher accept this book. I almost did. I never would have forgiven myself.  Once I made the decision that I wasn't willing to compromise my vision for the book or tame down the reality of the culture/community I grew up in I had to make some decisions.  I have another nonfiction book in the works and while I wanted Roving Pack as my sophomore book I realized that I was prepared to shelve this novel before I would release something that was watered down to fit the confines of what the publishing industry believed was safe. While I obviously was disappointed to be for the moment turning my attention to another project, I knew I'd made the kind of decisions the punks who raised me up would respect. Our world was one built on honor, I couldn't live with myself if I sold out by taming down our stories.

I'm very fortunate that my inner circle of friends are some of the most talented folks in the queer literary world – from authors and  independent booksellers, to promoters.  Early this winter, I sent an email, to folks in the industry whose perspective and opinions I really respect and asked if in their professional opinion they thought it would be career suicide if I were to consider publishing the book as a product of our production company PoMo Freakshow.  I sent the email on a whim, I was expecting an overwhelmingly negative response. I was not in anyway prepared for the response that I got.

Everyone told me to go for it.

I started thinking,  researching, organizing and ultimately planning. What would it mean if I went this route? After talking with so many people whose work and perspectives who reminded me that sometimes the most important work we do involves the biggest risk, I decided that I owed it to this book to bring it out into the world.  At the end of the day I still believe in a traditional publishing model. I believe there is something to be said for working with a respected publisher that can give solid support and backing to a project.  There is no doubt in my mind that I will chose for Nobody Loves You. Now What? about creating chosen families and the dangers of reunification models for homeless LGBTQ youth will come through a traditional publisher. Like Kicked Out, that is a book that while deeply queer has mainstream appeal.  Roving Pack is a very niche very fringy book even for the queer community.  I also knew that coming on the heels of Kicked Out I had the skills and connections to make Roving Pack a high quality well produced story and just as importantly because I handled all the PR and marketing strategy for Kicked Out I knew I'd be able to get the novel into the hands of readers.

I've assembled an editorial team that I trust and who really grasps the mission of the project, planned for hiring copyeditors, and hired a cover artist  — the incredibly talented KD Diamond.  KD was one of the first people I approached after making the decision that Roving Pack would be a production of PoMo Freakshow – I don't believe in judging a book by its cover, but I also knew that a book like this needed some kickass cover art.  I've been waiting for the right moment to make a formal announcement to the community, and "come out" if you will about the decision to publish Roving Pack, and that the book will be released autumn 2012.  On Friday evening I got the first draft sketch of KD's vision for the cover of Roving Pack. I fell in love with it instantly, especially the way she really captured the feel of the location something I really emphasized in our planning conversations and in the reference material I sent to her.  I've been hinting for the last few months on my facebook and twitter that the novel would be coming soon, but I hadn't found the right time to go public with the announcement.  having this preliminary art in hand, I knew this was the moment to introduce Roving Pack to all of you and announce it's fall 2012 release!!!!!!

High school was hard for me. I was bullied relentlessly through elementary and middle school and high school was no exception. The bullying I experienced only intensified when I came out as queer – I was one of only a couple seniors at the school in semi-rural/semi-suburban Oregon who were out.  We had very little teacher/administration support, and more often than not we were on our own to navigate what it meant to be quer in our high school. I became homeless early my senior year and along with another student founded the first GSA my high school ever had. I was verbally threatened daily by other students in the hallway, and on one occasion shoved into a wall of lockers by a football player.

I was told by the administration of my school that I was the first homeless teenager they had ever worked with, and that they really didn't know what to do with me.  I had one very strong ally amongst the faculty, but on the whole was very alone as I struggled through couch surfing and eventually moved to Portland (the nearest city) and commuted 2 hours each way by bus in order to finish my senior year.  I thought a lot about my experiences in high school as I worked on the Kicked Out anthology and was thrilled when the organization Live Out Loud  recently approached me about being a participant in their Homecoming Project .  The program brings LGBTQ adults back to their high schools  "to speak with a new generation of students about the unique experiences which have shaped the individuals they are today."

Thanks to technology this winter I'll be digitally touring back to my high school and visiting with the current students involved with the GSA I helped found a decade ago! I'm really excited about partnering with Live Out Loud for this unique project, am very much looking forward to talking with the GSA members stay tuned for future blog posts talking about what the experience of being back at my old high school was like!

In November I was really honored to have my voice included in the nationally airing on PBS series In The Life which spotlights the experiences of LGBTQ people across the country. In November the entire episode titled "Finding Home" focused on the epidemic of LGBTQ youth homelessness.  In one of the many apartments I crashed in as a queer teenager there was a TV. It didn't have cable, and barely picked anything up, but late at night sometimes my local PBS station would play this show  called 'In The Life' and I would sit transfixed. I don't remember the content of any episode really connecting to me or my life, the power of it came from just seeing LGBTQ people on TV. Before that I'd only seen my people occasionally on the news as the victims of hate crimes. It was this memory that in part, made the experience of being part of the show so special for me.

Over the month of November when the show was regularly airing I was routinely stopped by folks at queer events and even several times on the street because they recognized me from television and in some way connected personally with the stories I told, and what I had to say. This is a story that touches peoples lives, connecting them to an  aspect of their own experience they may hold deep shame around, or a population of our community they may know nothing about.  I'm so grateful that 'In The Life' gave me the opportunity to share my story and Kicked Out anthology with viewers this year, and am THRILLED to announce that "Finding Home" the November episode of In The Life, has been nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding TV Journalism – News Magazine!!!!

If you missed seeing the episode on PBS during the month of November, it can be streamed online here

Last Saturday I had the opportunity to guest curate Queer Memoir: Pets and make one of my homeless dog obsessed  baby-dyke dreams come true — creating a space where queers talked about how much they loved animals!  The evening was absolutely fantastic attended by nearly 80 people and featured incredible storytellers!   You can check out some of my thoughts about the dog focused part of the evening at The Bark magazine