Real Life, Lightly Edited

by Jean Roberta

This post is two days late, I know. On Friday, December 22, when this post was supposed to appear, I was frantically reading and marking student essays and exams to get them done before Christmas, AND making up two syllabi (complete schedules for new classes to be taught from January to April 2018). These were due December 20 at the latest, but I had NO TIME before Friday. On Saturday morning, I submitted my last set of grades to the department head, who probably won’t see them until the university re-opens on January 2, but at least I have them off my hands for the meanwhile.

I still have to make up a syllabus for my new Non-Fiction (or Advanced Composition) class, which I will teach for the first time in January. It’s part of the Creative Writing program. A new textbook is on its way. I assume I will be thinking hard about this class between December 26 and January 2. I can only do one thing at a time.

On Saturday, Spouse and I had lunch with Younger Stepson and his new girlfriend, partly so we could meet her. (This is our own version of Christmas lunch at the palace with Prince Harry and his fiancée, Meghan Markle.) Surprise! The new girlfriend is the older student who came to my office to discuss essay-writing and the new class, which she hoped would help her. She is registered in it, so I will be seeing her in class next semester after I see her this evening at the Christmas Eve family supper.

After lunch, Stepson proposed family hugs all around, and New Girlfriend felt understandably awkward to be hugging (or being hugged by) the instructor who will soon be evaluating her writing. We will just have to juggle the multiple roles as best we can.

This is all a prologue to my discussion of what I’ve been reading, aside from student essays.

Several weeks ago, I agreed to review a new novel by Nairne Holtz, a Canadian lesbian writer and librarian I’ve followed for years. Her new book, Femme Confidential, looks autobiographical. (One of the central characters, Liberty, was raised on the Canadian East Coast by expat American Quaker parents, like the author.) It’s all about coming out into the lesbian community of Toronto in the 1980s and continuing to live there to the current time. Many of the characters live in the neighbourhood of Parkdale, formerly rundown but now gentrified, much like Greenwich Village in NYC. (My daughter, her husband, and their kids lucked into a reasonably-priced house in Parkdale earlier in this century.)



Of course, I wonder how much of the novel is based on the novelist’s life, and whether I am less than six degrees of separation from several of the people on whom the characters are based. (Since the early 1980s, a surprising—to me—number of lesbians have moved from Toronto to Regina, Saskatchewan, where I live, but none of them have stayed.)

As a reviewer, however, I have to say that the novel works as fiction, and the sex is seamlessly blended into character development. The book could be described as erotica which fits better with literary fiction than with one-handed reads.

The following scene contains a plot twist which is both logical and surprising. Liberty has been living with her “boyfriend,” David, on the rebound from Veronika, the woman she really wants, but who can’t seem to stay faithful. Liberty has told David she wants to break up. David tells her he wants to become a woman.

David asked, ‘Are you mad?’

I shook my head. Got up and sat on the couch beside him. Felt him cradle my hand. ‘Would you call me Dana?’

He already had a name picked out.

‘Okay.’ I said his new name out loud. ‘Dana.’

David—Dana. . I was going to have to start thinking of her as Dana, as she—wiped at one of her eyes. ‘I’m so glad you’re okay with this. I didn’t think you would be. That’s why I didn’t tell you.’

Tears formed in my eyes. ‘Yeah, but it’s sad we’re breaking up.’

Dana stared at me. ‘Being with me if I transition means being a lesbian.’

Right, okay, why hadn’t I thought of it that way? What she was saying was perfectly logical and didn’t matter—I didn’t want to be with him—her—anymore.

‘That’s not enough, is it?’

‘No.’ I didn’t try to explain. The truth I supposed was I hadn’t meant to get involved with him. I had wanted Veronika and consoled myself with David.

She pulled her hand away from mine and stood up. ‘Fuck.’

I stood up. ‘David. . .’

She turned from me, threw up her hands, stormed into what had been our bedroom, and closed the door.

I read the novel in a brief lull between student assignments, and my review is overdue.

I also picked up Sisters in the Life, a non-fiction anthology about African-American lesbian filmmakers to review for The Gay & Lesbian Review. (The editor regularly sends a list of titles and brief blurbs to the reviewers on his list, and we choose what we want.) This book was published by Duke University Press, which liked my review of an earlier book by film scholar Kara Keeling so much that they quoted three different excerpts from my review on their website.



African-American lesbian filmmakers! Who knew they were a community with a body of work to their credit? The book includes photos, and I look forward to reading about films that I’m sure I will want to see, if there is a way to get them. (I know how to order books from bookstores and through Interlibrary Loans from the campus library, but film is a whole other medium.)

Last but not least, my contributor’s copy of The Sexy Librarian’s Dirty Thirty, Volume 2, arrived in the mail! I also have a story in Volume 1 of this series, but I don’t think that was ever printed. (It is available as an ebook and a podcast.) I will have to tear myself away from these stories to work on the stuff I need to write.



As usual, I have bitten off more than I can easily chew. I’m grateful that my mind still seems to be as sound as it ever was (ha), and I’m able to get from one place to another, even on dangerously icy ground. (A local journalist posted a pic of a slick-shiny street on Facebook to shame the city government which has not sent enough machines with graders and snow-melting salt to make the infrastructure navigable.)

Happy winter holidays to everyone here.

Looking at the Edge of the Cliff

by Jean Roberta

(Note: November 2 was my day to post. Please excuse me for showing up a day late. Yesterday I was giving a presentation called Ripe Fruit: Queer Sex on the Page to a small, select audience in the university where I teach. It was the first presentation in a series run by the "Queer Initiative" (faculty group) on all sorts of gay/lesbian/bi/trans topics. I made myself a kind of loose script for my talk, so I can post parts of it here when relevant to the current topic.)

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To retire or not to retire? That is the question.

Well, not really. Much as I like to imagine myself just as I am now when I turn 65 (in 4 years), then 70, then 80, then 85, then – common sense tells me that I’m not immortal, and I won’t be able to teach forever.

The very cool thing about a writing career, however, is that it can last until death. When the playwright George Bernard Shaw left this earth in 1950, at age 94 (and I’m sure this event surprised his many fans and enemies who thought he would never shut up), he left an unfinished play in his desk. I like to imagine him haunting his former digs, trying to find a way to write the final act without fingers.

So I don’t ever really have to retire, if retirement means not working at all. However, I definitely see my teaching phase as having a final act followed by (I hope) a fabulous lunch, catered by the University Club, on a warm spring day in the outdoor space outside the university library with the fountain splashing between two long, groaning tables. (I attended a retirement lunch like that for one of my former profs, who was then my colleague. Retirement events, like weddings, are inspiring.)

Then what? No more garbled student essays to grade! No more plagiarists to deal with! No more students who skip half the classes in a semester, then show up on the last day, asking, “What did I miss?” No endless department meetings. No administration that expects the department to keep doing more with less. No government cutbacks to cope with.

No more fresh young faces, full of curiosity. No more interesting grammatical challenges. (Why do so many first-year students write almost entirely in past-perfect tense, and how can I persuade them not to?) No more amazing, unexpected compliments on the anonymous evaluation forms that all students are asked to fill in on the last day of class. (Last spring, someone wrote, “I hate English, but I love Jean.”)

Full days of “writing,” staring at a computer screen for eight hours at a stretch. (Or cleaning house, walking the dogs, going out for coffee to avoid self-imposed writing assignments.)

One of my former colleagues, a British-born Canadian writer named Joan Givnor (whose apparently effortless style I’ve always admired) wrote an essay on her experience of early retirement (at age 55), followed by a move to the West Coast with her husband. She sat in front of the computer screen in a room with windows that showed a different landscape than she was used to – and her old friends were too far away to visit on a whim. She realized, too late, how intellectually stimulating it was to have fellow-teachers (many of whom were also fellow-writers) available for conversation at almost any time during a working day.

Eventually, Joan adjusted to the big change in her life, cultivated local friends, and launched her post-retirement writing career. Since then, she has written a critically-acclaimed series of YA novels. (This surprised me, since she was formerly best known for short stories and book-length biographies of other writers, but I’ve read enough about other writers myself to know that a change of genre can give a writer a fresh start.)

I dread the transition from one phase of life to another. Much as I sometimes think (like other writers) that I could enjoy being in solitary confinement with a stack of paper and a box of pencils, I know there are reasons why prisoners in serious lockups (Alcatraz or your typical medieval dungeon) were known to go stark raving mad, sooner or later. And it wasn’t because of the rats, who might have seemed like welcome company.

So I don’t plan to leave the well-populated Ivory Tower exactly at “normal retirement age” (65), since I now have the legal freedom to stay awhile longer. Among other things, I want to make sure I will have enough money to live on, assuming I will live to 110, give or take a few years. (A future as an arthritic bag lady trying to sleep on cold cement doesn’t seem appealing.) I don’t have a clear plan yet.

But I would like a fabulous farewell lunch. :)

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

“All abo-o-ard!”

The conductor is announcing the departure of a venerable train that crosses the continent from Obscurity on one coast (home to the aspiring traveller) to Fame (the destination) on the other. There are luxurious cars for dining and sleeping, even gambling and card-playing. Drawn shades at windows might indicate Torrid Affairs being conducted en route.

There is nothing like a train as a traditional symbol of escape and adventure. When I was young, a train threw its poignant hoot against a layer of volcanic rock at the base of a mountain every evening as the shadows lengthened, and every evening, the echoes reverberated through the valley where I felt trapped in a house on the opposite side. “Woo-oo! Leaving here!” called the train while I dreamed of escape.

And now the train to Fame is leaving without me. I can’t possibly catch up. The wheels are already turning faster and faster as the big vehicle picks up speed. Had I arrived at the station five minutes earlier, I could have boarded. I could have been on my way. But I didn’t, and I’m not.

I missed the deadline.

In a marvellous anthology of steampunk erotic romance that I just finished reading (Steamlust, edited by Kristina Wright of this blog), the heroine of one story uses her auspiciometer (sp?) to determine the perfect moment for doing whatever she wants to do: meet the right gentleman, start or finish the calculations for an experiment, go shopping for a hat or a parasol or a pet snake. Her handy device shows her the perfect moment. This doesn’t necessarily mean she will always be in the right place at the right time. Even with the device, she might miss a deadline.

Pregnancy is the one project with a deadline which can never be missed. Due dates can be missed, of course; first pregnancies, in particular, are often several weeks early or several weeks late (if not induced). But the day of birth is the day of birth. Much as an expectant mother might prefer not to experience third-degree labour soon, today, or at this moment, contractions wait for no one.

Human-made deadlines are more like train departures. Once the train has gone, it’s no longer there.

Please! Wait for me!

I hate to be considered irresponsible and unreliable, so after I’ve made a reckless promise or six, I chase after deadlines like a stranded traveller chasing after the only train due to pass through the mountains all week, or the only ship that has come within sight of the desert island for months.

Where does time go? I should have written at least two more reviews this month (see the above reference to Steamlust, which sits atop Red Velvet and Absinthe, Best Lesbian Erotica 2012, Princes of Air, Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme, and a volume of vintage gay-male erotica from the 1970s).

Then well-meaning fellow-writers and polite colleagues ask me what I’m writing now, meaning “Are you writing a short story, a collection of them or a novel, and why not?” Of course, I should have time for that. If I’m a real writer, inspiration should strike me regularly, like a gong (as in a notorious saying about how often women should be beaten).

Students who ask for extensions of deadlines for handing in essays want them to be graded and handed back between one class day and the next. What else could be more important to me?

Sinister characters like uncanny train conductors invade my dreams with signs reading “FRIDAY” or “NOVEMBER 30” or “TOMORROW AT THE LATEST.”

Then there are events like Pride Week in June (mentioned by Kathleen of this blog) which I managed to unload onto a new committee. Ha! Freedom! But it’s not complete. I wonder how well the new committee of twentysomethings will cope, and how responsible I’ll feel (as an elder of the tribe) if they drop the ball, or several.

But here is a strangely reassuring thought: every time I miss a deadline, a new one is coming up behind it. And with luck, I’ll miss the deadline (due date) for the end of my own life. Am I supposed to be on that train at age 96? Sorry, I’ll still have a few things to finish up first.
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