Edmonton Lesbian+ Book Club

Hey everyone, Please, please, please make a special effort to come out to book club next Tuesday for a special get-together with Winnipeg author Chandra Mayor , whose "All the Pretty Girls" was one of our selections last fall. Chandra's going to read, and chat with us and commiserate about life, I think. Can't wait. Please come to the event at Audrey's bookstore, at 7:00 pm on Tuesday, April 6, 2010. This is a public event, so please invite your friends - doesn't have to be book clubbers only! 7:00!!! (not 7:30 as previously advertised..) (side note : yes we're postponing Shani Mootoo's Valmiki's Daughter until next month to accommodate Chandra's sudden availability)

poetry and music with some feisty ladies... including Laurie McFayden, poet, artist, friend and visitor of book club! Saturday, April 3, 2010 8:00pm - 11:00pm Axis Cafe 10349 Jasper Avenue

Lambda Literary Foundation from Word Is Up on Vimeo . The Lambda Lit Award Finalists are up: Lesbian Fiction Dismantled , by Jennifer McMahon (HarperCollins) A Field Guide to Deception , by Jill Malone (Bywater Books) Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory, by Emma Pérez (University of Texas Press) Risk , by Elena Dykewomon (Bywater Books) This One's Going to Last Forever , by Nairne Holtz (Insomniac Press) Lesbian Debut Fiction The Creamsickle , by Rhiannon Argo (Spinsters Ink) The Bigness of the World , by Lori Ostlund (University of Georgia Press) Land Beyond Maps, by Maida Tilchen (Savvy Press) More of This World or Maybe Another , by Barb Johnson (HarperCollins) Verge , by Z Egloff (Bywater Books)

Hi all, I forgot to blog about The Gilda Stories . For me, something of a "vampire stories are hokey" kind of person, it was impressive. It was well-written. The transitions were great. The vampire stuff wasn't hokey. It was kind of interesting. To me!!! To others in the book club, who actually appreciate vampire stories, it was better than that! Consensus seemed to be all thumbs up except for some lack of love for the ending. Wrapped up too quickly, too much of a twist in character, and just yech on the future stuff that wasn't far enough in the future to be believable... I think it would make a GREAT movie. Especially if the last section with the hunters was left out and she instead went and fell in love with Aurelia's great-granddaughter!

Author Cris Beam's website has a teacher's guide for Transparent: Love, Family and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers . The guide could also work as discussion questions for us. Last month we talked about having discussion questions in mind while reading... so. Take a look. Here are a couple that caught my attention... 1) Cris Beam outlines the difference between being transgender and transsexual. Were you familiar with this distinction before reading the book? 2) How have you defined family throughout your life? Who have your best “parents” been? Did you have the equivalent of a “drag mother,” someone you were not related to but who modeled your ideal and gave you entry into an otherwise closed community? 3) An element of adolescence is experimentation. How, ultimately, do we know which aspects of our behavior are pure experimentation and which ones reflect our true identity? Have you ever encountered a situation in which the line between healthy and harmful experimenta...

The annual Canada Reads festivities have started and guess what? One of earliest reads in this book is one of the five finalists this year. I thought maybe, if people are interested, we might revisit Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald at our next meeting. Does anybody remember it? Did anybody read it? I remember I myself couldn't quite finish it as it was too disturbing and sad for me. But maybe I'll try and pick it up again. Of course, this would only be in addition to our current month's pick: Transparent , by Cris Beam.

An event happening in Edmonton... check it out on Facebook! Hiromi Goto at Olive!

work, work, work Originally uploaded by kim.mama we've been busy. distracted. a little off the ball. but we're back on track. made some adjustments to the reading list - see the left-hand column. join us, okay?

This month we're reading Chandra Mayor's short stories "All the Pretty Girls." We've been on a streak lately of lesbian fiction with little to no actual lesbian content, so we're having some high hopes for this one. The sci- fi experiment was interesting. We had a couple of fans, and a couple of haters... the mixed bag always makes for good discussion. We tried to stretch the envelope looking for queer content but the gender neutral characters were all we could find. And they were creepy. Although some people wanted a diagram of way they mated because they couldn't visualize it... very amusing. If you find a diagram, illustration or some such? Send it, I'll post it! We also made a few adjustments to the reading list based on availability and stuff. Check the current reading list. We added Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories due to one member's need for a story about a black lesbian vampire raised in a whorehouse. Ha! As always, we love request...

Here we go girls. This month we're reading Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood . It's actually 3 books in one. But we can handle it. It's part of our reach out and touch some sci-fi venture. Last month's title, My Miserable Lonely Lesbian Pregnancy by Andrea Askowitz, was great. I loved it. A few were lukewarm. One person got a little scared since she's thinking about getting pregnant. The biggest part of the discussion was the great humour in her honesty about how she was feeling - how she didn't buy into the whole "i'm glowing and doing nature's work" myth that is out there for women; and then how there was this complete reversal when the baby came - the whole "i fell in love with the baby the second i saw her and knew just what to do and it made me feel like a natural woman" thing. I think some felt a tiny bit betrayed by that sudden flip in attitude. I myself experienced that instant bond and trusting my intuition about mot...