Living as a Lesbian

Sinister Wisdom 113: Radical Muses features an eclectic array of contemporary poetry, prose, and art by lesbians from around the world, including new work by: Andrea Assaf, Tara Shea Burke, Cheryl Clarke, Marina Chirkova, Estela González, Barbara Haas, Nancy E. Lake, Vi Khi Nao, H. Ní Aódagaín and much more!

Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival honors the forty-year legacy of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (1976–2015). Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival celebrates this embodiment of radical feminist separatist collaboration, transformational self-defined autonomous spaces, a commitment to sisterhood and matriarchal culture, and a musical city sprung from the earth for one week in the woods.

A collective of five womyn each with a deep connection to Fest operated by consensus to create this issue. Striving to represent a range of womyn’s voices, values, traditions, and experiences of Fest, the collective highlighted what Fest has meant to generations of womyn, documented its chronology, and bore witness to the power of this community. Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival includes womyn from multiple races, geographies, sexualities, generations, and gender and other social identities. Just as Fest brought together womyn from various backgrounds, our collection includes a range of artistic experience, from seasoned authors and photographers to those womyn new to publishing.
Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival remembers the transformations, possibilities, and hopes for spaces cultivating the ongoing empowerment of womyn.

JEB (Joan E. Biren) first introduced viewers to her photographs in 1979 when she published Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians, a groundbreaking celebration of women loving women. In the years that followed, JEB collaborated with poets, musicians, filmmakers, elected officials, healthcare providers, factory workers, spiritual leaders, and others who built communities and worked for political change. Her second book Making a Way: Lesbians Out Front, published in 1987, depicts the spirit and energy of this movement in more than a hundred emotionally resonant photographs that take us from passionate activism to thoughtful solitude, while remarks and remembrances from each woman photographed deepen the historic record. This reissue of Making a Way adds insightful new essays by Cheryl Clarke and JD Samson, resulting in an essential document of an era whose impact continues to be felt across our society today.

The latest in writer and visual artist Renee Gladman's ever-expanding body of imaginative investigation is a sui generis novel of queerness and art-making, philosophy and sex. 

The narrator of My Lesbian Novel is Renee Gladman, an artist and writer who has produced the same acclaimed body of experimental art and prose as real-life Renee Gladman, and who is now being interviewed by an unnamed interlocutor about a project in process, a seeming departure from her other works, a lesbian romance. 

Between reflections on art making and on the genre of lesbian romance - "though aspects of the formula drive me crazy... people who write these stories understand how beautiful women are" - a romance novel of her own takes shape on the page, written alongside the interview, which sometimes skips whole years between questions, so that time and aging become part of the process. 

The result is a beautifully orchestrated dialogue between reflection and desire, or clarity and confusion, between the pleasures of form and the pleasures of freedom in the unspooling of sentences over time.

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing, and architecture. She is the author of fourteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, all published by Dorothy— Event Factory, The Ravickians, Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, and Houses of Ravicka. She has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), and was a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize winner in fiction. She makes her home in New England with poet-ceremonialist Danielle Vogel.

Matters of Feminist Practice, edited by Poupeh Missaghi and Karla Kelsey, brings together scholars, writers, poets, and artists of different identities and backgrounds to confer on the urgent topic of “feminist practice” through seven topics: the body, the quotidian, hybridity, language, documentation, environment, and conflict.

In the twenty-five scholarly and creative-critical pieces included in our introductory volume, each contributor brings unique visions, insights, approaches, voices, and forms to launch the conversation, which will continue to unfold online at mfpjournal.com. 

Contributors to the inaugural issue include: Alexis Almeida, Mary-Kim Arnold, Mildred Barya, Teresa Carmody, Julie Carr, Serena Chopra, Caroline Crumpacker, Lynne DeSilva-Johnson, Marcella Durand, Jennifer Firestone, Yanara Friedland, Carla Harryman, Madhu Kaza, Petra Kuppers, Jean Lee, Rachel Levitsky, Megan Madden, Saretta Morgan, Lida Nosrati, Adrienne Perry, Frances Richard, Kat Savino, Celina Su, and Rachael Guynn Wilson.

The prequel to Love Me Tender, narrating Debré's transformation from affluent career woman to broke single lesbian and writer.

I see all her beauty, I see the beauty of women. I see my own body, new. I tell myself there are so many things that are possible.

First published in France in 2018, Playboy is the first volume of Constance Debré's renowned autobiographical trilogy that describes her decision, at age forty-three, to abandon her marriage, her legal career, and her bourgeois Parisian life to become a lesbian and a writer.

The novel unfolds in a series of short, sharp vignettes. The narrator's descriptions of her first female lovers—a married woman fifteen years older than her, a model ten years her junior—are punctuated by encounters with her ex-husband, her father, and her son.

As Debré recently told Granta: “It was a bit like Saint Augustine and his conversion. In the same week, I had sex with a girl and I had the feeling that I could write. I had this incredible feeling that I could catch things, that life was there to be caught.”

Looking at the world through fresh eyes, the narrator of Playboy questions everything that once lay beneath the surface of her well-managed life. Laconic, aggressive, and radically truthful, she examines gender and marriage, selfishness and sacrifice, money and family, even the privilege inherent in her downward mobility.

Writing her way toward her own liberation, Debré chronicles the process that made her one of the most brilliant, important French writers today.

Do we always have to be nice, kind and communicate respectfully? Wouldn't it sometimes be better to change our tone, to use force or even violence? We often want to act in a spirit of “care” and benevolence, but how do we know if we're really being altruistic and sympathetic? Vol.5 asks the question: Nice?

With contributions from :
Muf architecture/art, Mélanie Mazet, Bui Quy Son, Paul-Antoine Lucas, Armelle Breuil, Annabelle Vaillant, Napsugár Trömböczky, Alessandro Di Egidio,
Elsa Muller, Clara Lenoir, Léo Jacqmin, Clem Koren, Pola Noury, Grève cœur and Cassiane C. Pfund

This publication is edited by the Woman Cave collective founded by Leticia Chanliau and Chloé Macary-Carney.

318 black & white pages, brown cover
Micro edition of 700, printed in Aubervilliers by Isiprint.