excerpt.

From "An Aching Sky". 

Pearls can worn with anything. They lay against my throat in a double strand of memory and wealth, slightly yellowed with age but lustrous with accumulated wisdom. They are the only thing I wear besides underwear that never matches and a thousand league stare. That look is too old for the rest of me. 

"May!" The call comes from the other side of the door. "Five minutes!"

Catcher always sounds like he's speaking through a mouthful of bourbon, halfway between drowning and fire. I listen to the bumbling tread of his footsteps as he wheels away from the door and up the rickety steps to the piano lounge. Five minutes. It is not a whole lot of time, but I continue to watch the mirror anyway. I make a hungry reflection. 

The dress is donned with fast moving hands, pinching and tugging until the zipper stops. Frail silk clings to my body, wrapping me up in the color of an aching sky. I don't need to look back at the mirror to know what it does to me. Ellie May Temple has been transformed into a spotlight. Mama would be proud.

ideas.

From a blog post titled little bits of bone, 29 August 2009.

"Ideas happen in a frozen rush. They form always, interminable, and at unexpected intervals pop like match strikes against all of your senses. You lose track of where you are, what’s playing the radio, airing on the television, and God knows whoever and whatever else might be watching. They can paralyze or ride you to your feet, spinning, muttering as though you’re caught in an infinite conversation with the universe, with the hours, and in buckshot-like scatters of language, clips and phrases of coherency, you are abruptly speaking in the tongues of angels even if it is on the devils you are elaborating. You have lost your moorings and, aware of it, grope for both a hold as well as a hand up higher, always higher and so find a pen or cigarette, a keyboard or a drink (the very fortunate find all of these) and because the minutes are mumbling dire warnings of running out and the taste of fear in the back of your throat says sweetly this all may go pew-pew or kaboom or up, up in ashes and embers if you don’t get it out, get it down, right now, before your heart thuds another beat, you write."

Ideas have been on my mind today. Everyone asks where they come from, but what I want to know is where they go. They go to the page or the computer screen or they sit inside of you, waiting impatiently for their turn. Sometimes the last you see of them is their backs as they walk away, fade out, neglected and malnourished. Ideas can take you anywhere and the bad ones do so with elegiac smiles and beckoning hands. You don't always know they're bad until you're halfway to the end or, if you're really unlucky, not until it's all over. 

Sometimes you have to the let idea lead you where it will to find out how good it is, how good it can be. Other times it's best to get a jump on the idea, wrap it up, tuck it in and take it with you.

I'm going to go on and take the one I have now and get it down. More later. 

call me ken.

When a professor at a liberal arts college that proudly promotes their open-mindedness tells their female writing students that they should have three names to publish under – one for their primary genre, one for materials written outside of that genre, and one male pseudonym – there is something rotten in Denmark. Then we learn that the professor in question is a woman and our eyebrows rise to our hairlines.

Or do they?

I would like to imagine that this professor advised her students of this with a disclaimer stating her disagreement with the prejudice this advice implies is alive and well in the publishing industry and/or the reading public. This advice, while not direct evidence of discrepancies in the treatment of men and women in the industry, is absolutely indicative of it; and, most likely, the professor was only attempting to inform and so forewarn her female students.

Thems the breaks?


The women’s literary organization VIDA, as mentioned in the earlier post announcing the opening of Fuck Yeah Lady Writers, has found yet again that there is a sizable disparity between the number of men and women writing for major publications, and between the number of men and women being published. I have been involved of late in numerous conversations regarding these discrepancies with both writers and avid readers, the result of which is a series of impromptu interviews. This greenhorn research has failed to answer many of my questions and instead only raised others.  


This is a problem that belongs primarily to the people, not to the publishers. The publishers are looking to sell what the people will buy. Of course, as a couple undergrad business/marketing classes taught me, demand for a product can be manipulated to a degree by the seller.


Born and raised in the South, I was taught that gentlemen hold doors for me, carry my bags and invite me to order before them in restaurants. My brother and I were told this was a form of respect, one for me to not only accept but to expect in polite society. My brother was taught that did he fail to perform these duties, he was not a gentleman. I cannot say I disagree with this. Surely such tasks were being performed by men for women for centuries, long before Women's Lib. Of course, back then women were often expected to defer to men in intellectual matters and were denied many of what are now considered basic human rights and legal protections. History has cast its shadow over us and where does a modern, free thinking woman know where to draw the line? Know how? 


The line cannot possibly be drawn before the expectation to promote yourself as a man in order to be published. Can it? I have personally been advised by at least three people in the publishing industry to use the initial of my given name, to write under K. Bishop Sullivan or K. Sullivan Lingle rather than Kathleen. That is, I was told, unless I intend to write "chick lit" or "young adult".


The worst part is that I have done exactly this. I have accepted this. I have expected this. Yet this, while perhaps not outright prejudice, is certainly not respect. Therefore ought I regret it? Should I change that practice going forward? Would you as a reader be less inclined to buy a science fiction novel by a Kathleen Sullivan than you would by a Ken Sullivan? Would you be more inclined to buy a romance novel or a Young Adult novel by a Kathleen over a Ken? What about the blessedly androgynous "K"? 


Studies show that you would be. Publishers believe you are. 


Is it true? I honestly want to know. 


A male associate of mine told me that while he possesses no conscious bias in this regard, he refuses to read more Anne Rice after having read one of her books. He enjoys her genre. He appreciates her writing style. He likes her stories. So why does he refuse to read her books? He said it was because, as a heterosexual man, he is distinctly uncomfortable reading intense, sexual content when he knows the author is a woman. 


That is an answer, an honest answer that I can respect even if I do not completely understand it. I want more answers. I want to know why and I really want to know what can be done about it.


I am proud to be a female writer. I don't know how to let you call me Ken.