Off to Nashville!

My flight leaves tomorrow at six a.m. (and I am no morning person), but I'm excited to be heading to Vanderbilt University to give a reading and serve on a cool panel on lower and working-class women writers.   (It's sort of like the anti-Margaret Seltzer symposium.) 

In honor of panelist Dorothy Allison, here's a passage from her book of essays Skin:  Talking About Sex, Class & Literature:

That fact, the inescapable impact of being born in a condition of poverty that this society finds shameful, contemptible, and somehow deserved, has had dominion over me to such an extent that I have spent my life trying to overcome or deny it.  I have learned with great difficulty that the vast majority of people believe that poverty is a voluntary condition.  (15)

And here's another little somethin'-somethin' from the same book:

. . . I have come to make distinctions between what I call the academy and literature, the moral equivalents of the church and God.  The academy may lie, but literature tries to tell the truth.  The academy is the market--university courses in contemporary literature that never get past Faulkner, reviewers who pepper their opinions with the ideas of the great men, and editors who think something is good because it says the same thing everyone has always said.  Literature is the lie that tells the truth, that shows us human beings in pain and makes us love them, and does so in a spirit of honest revelation.  (175)

And here's a little shout-out to Firebrand Books, the folks who published Skin and a whole bunch of other great books.  Firebrand's an independent lesbian and feminist press committed to racial and ethnic diversity, and they publish some great writers.