Author of the new release: Dispatch To Death as well as earlier New Victoria titles: Nine Nights On The Windy Tree

I have been making up stories for as long as I can remember. I was a slow reader as a kid, but I loved it, probably because my Grandma my ' (much like Bertha Brannon's) taught me about the great things that were in books. I am a voracious reader. But back to writing—when I was in 7th grade I wrote my first novel. I used to carry the chapters to school and work on them during math class. I always considered myself a writer, though after high school a lot of years passed before I wrote again. Even now it's easy to let a lot of time pass without writing. Life gets filled up with so much other junk.

This probably sounds strange but writing makes sense to me mathematically (maybe because I did so much of it during math class). I love the way sentences fit together. I love a well turned phrase. I get chills when I read something with an epiphany. Writing takes some amount of sacrifice. Sometimes it's hard for me to get started. But once I turn the computer on and am sitting in front of it, the rest of the world doesn't exist. I guess I want to fix life up too. Life is this big messy thing with no structure. So when I write, I put life in sentences and paragraphs-I twist around the endings the way I think they should be, and I make some truth with a capital ('T:' I feel a little like an articulate Goddess (read creator).

Because not many other writers do. I want to say the word lesbian so many times and get it in print so many times that it is just another word like man or woman or horse. Many publishers say that women buy more books than men, yet gay men are getting more of their books published and with larger print runs. Lesbian books should be there for young girls who feel "different" and for young lesbians in love (why should they have to read ~bout straight people fucking?—and for women struggling with raising kids or keeping a job or fighting with the world to be who they are.

Things are better now when I was fifteen and wanted a book about me, but they are far from perfect. And too many lesbians are writing books about cats. We need to be writing books about our- selves.

Jesus, where would we be without them? Thanks to independent presses like New Victoria and others w°rn.en don't have to let main- stream America dictate what they read and what they write.

We need to see ourselves reflected in writing the same way that other minorities do. Our books should be in with mysteries AND in the les- bian section too. We have a long way to go. Where is the lesbian "Giovanni’s Room?" Where is the lesbian Toni Morrison? Some lesbians are in academia, but not in the writing department. There we've been relegated to "women's studies" and our work is somewhat devalued

because of it.

Why do you choose struggling working-class protagonists? Because that's really who I am underneath this education. My father worked in a factory all his life. He had an eighth grade education. We ironed blue uniform work shirts for him every Monday night. My grandfather and uncles all worked in that factory and they all died in their 40~ and 50s. I loved those people. I remember when they were on strike and we ate bologna every night and went to the union hall for doughnuts for breakfast when the eggs we got from my Grand- pa's chicken house ran out. My dad loved motorcycles and taught me to ride when I was a kid. He, like Trudy's dad, rode summer and winter. Anyway, there are too many books about academia and over educated heroines. Not many people write about the 40 plus hour a week people who have to consider the cost of everything that hap- pens to them, and they are too darn busy to write about them- selves--or as in my case they died too young. But I'll bet they (working class dykes) are happy to find themselves in print now and then.