>> I have a thing with mics.
A very problematic relationship.
Can you all see me?
I want to welcome all of you here, and I would like to thank Alison Deming
and the Poetry Center for their invitation and also for putting me
up at this beautiful Poetry Center Cottage that I have all to myself.
It's such a luxury to have a whole apartment to myself instead of,
you know, some little crummy hotel room.
[ Laughter ]
No, I want it crossways.
Yeah, yep, like that, because I'm so short.
I'm 4' 11".
I used to be 4' 11-1/2", but I shrunk in the last 10 years.
My vertebrae are settling.
I also want to thank SIROW and the Women's Studies along
with Karen Anderson for facilitating my visit here.
Who else? I want to acknowledge the four SIROW scholars.
I don't know, whatever you are called, but there's four of them,
but I only see three of them here.
There she is.
Okay, Miriam Bornstein.
Stand.
[ Applause ]
Christine Marin.
[ Applause ]
Ana Louise Keating.
I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right, and Shane [? Phelan ?].
Did I pronounce yours right?
[ Applause ]
I would like to dedicate this reading to Yolanda Leyva.
Yolanda, are you here?
>> Hi.
>> Yolanda is an old housemate of mine, back in my first PhD program in Austin,
and I've tried to squeeze a little time out to spend with her, but thus far have not managed
to do that, but we'll keep trying.
Okay? I haven't forgotten you.
I would like, before I get into the reading proper, there's a couple of publications
that I want to pass the word on to you.
Sinister Wisdom is a magazine for and by lesbians that I've been affiliated
with since 1964 -- no, that's not true, since 1984.
It seems like since 1964, but we have an issue that's an issue
by women of color that's coming up.
You're too late to submit for the open issue.
The deadline closed earlier this month, but there's an issue for women of color.
The deadline is February 15, and you send your poems, essays, artwork, narratives, whatever,
to them, and you can see me after, if you want the address.
I have a flyer here, if somebody wants it.
Lesbians of color only, sorry.
I, myself, will be co-editing another anthology, which is an anthology that is going
to explore the mestiza consciousness, and I will be co-editing it with Shelley Fishkin Fisher,
a Jewish feminist from Austin, and if any of you,
in all colors, all classes, all nationalities.
We have some internationalists also contributing.
If you'd like more information about that, I have a few flyers, maybe, for you.
Francisco Alarcon is a gay man from the same place that I'm from right now,
which is Santa Cruz, and a year before I started Borderlands,
I had started a book called De Las Otras, De Los Otros, which is a book of lesbian,
or I should say Chicana dykes and Chicano gay men, and did not get a tremendous amount
of manuscripts, so I had to put it on a back burner, and in the meantime,
two more books have come out of me, out of this body, and we resuscitated this anthology, and,
hopefully, because he is helping me, maybe we can get more men to contribute.
So, if anybody is a Chicana dyke or a Chicano gay man, sorry, but the rest of you.
So, anyway, that's a couple of years down the road.
The Mestiza Consciousness is about three years down the road, and about four years
down the road is another book that I, myself, am editing all by myself.
It's called Chicana Theory.
That's the working title right now, and I hope that it'll be a place where Chicanas, scholars,
and creative writers can come together and do some good writing, some good scholarship,
some good research, come up with some good ideas.
So, if anybody's interested in that, Chicanas only, sorry.
[ Laughter ]
I also wanted to acknowledge Chuck Tatum.
Is he here?
Chuck? Maybe I shouldn't acknowledge him, then.
For changing the title of his annual from New Chicano Writing to New Chicana/Chicano Writing
at my urging and as well as allowing for Spanish and Spanglish Tex-Mex,
where he at first only wanted English.
So, the first two things that I'm going to read are what I call short shorts that are
in the New Chicana/Chicano writers annual that's going to be out in April.
I'm going to read Puddles first, and then I'm going to read Ghost Trap secondly.
I'm going to deviate a little bit from my usual format.
What I do is, I do three little sets.
I read like two or three things, and then I open it up for discussion.
I read two or three things and open it up for discussion, and then end with another two
or three things, but I think because there's so many of you here that want
to hear me rather than yourselves.
I would rather hear you, but I will just read.
Okay? And, huh?
Es major. And at the end, you know, however the schedule goes, there may be some time
for response, but I don't like to do it this way, okay?
[ Laughter ]
Sorry.
[ Laughter ]