September 2010

Turns out that they don't in Germany–too afraid of having their ideas stolen, apparently.

That's not an attitude that makes
sense to Elana. The lesbian writing community, she says, "nourishes me every day." Besides, "our conversations and trust spark ideas, and when others transform our ideas in their work, our thoughts start moving in time." Nor are these mere words; Elana has lived her ideals.

While at college, she realized she hadn't read a piece of fiction that allowed lesbians to have–wait for it–a happy ending. So she wrote it herself. Riverfinger Women was published in 1974 by Daughter's Inc., and was the first novel ever to be advertised as "lesbian" in the New York Times. For that reason alone, it deserves its place on the Publishing Triangle's list of the 100 best lesbian and gay novels.

If you come across a first edition of Riverfinger Women, you'll see that Elana used her birth surname on the cover. She changed it shortly afterward, choosing "Dykewoman" to describe who she is–and because, she figured, a name like that would keep her out of the New York Times. (It did. More than three decades later, it still does.) And because it reminds her daily of her choice to be a cultural worker–a member of the communities about which she writes.

Within a few years, she had amended her name again, this time to "Dykewomon." Now free from any link to the word "man," this was the name she used for her first collection of poetry, Fragments from Lesbos. This, she decided, would be for lesbians only. That may sound unlikely, but Elana was a trained typesetter and letterpress printer–who quot;still misses the interaction of lead type with the tooth of paper, the sculptural dimension of print"–so she printed the collection herself, advertised it in lesbian journals only, and all 600 copies sold out.

That's typical of Elana. With her, it's hard to separate her writing from her activism. It's no coincidence that she gave 10 years to writing Beyond the Pale, set in the years of the Progressive Era, when women were fighting for the vote and involved in the emerging union movement. Today, she stands whenever she can with Women in Black (the international women's peace movement) and also champions fat rights. Both threads of her current activism are woven together in her latest novel, Risk, which deftly exposes the traumas of war, and shows how the wounds of one generation injure the next. Not surprisingly, it brought Elana the Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist award of 2009. To find out more about Risk, see Spotlight below.

Of course, it's not just in novels and poems that Elana has expressed herself. Some of her most important work began life as articles that were copied and recopied, often by hand, and then passed from woman to woman; many were later published in journals. For seven years she was an editor of Sinister Wisdom, the international journal of lesbian art and politics, and she has contributed to many lesbian journals, including Common Lives/Lesbian Lives, The Journal of Lesbian Studies, and most recently Trivia online. She has given hundreds of spoken word performances across America and Europe, and in Jerusalem. Currently she teaches at San Francisco State University; she also offers private tuition in creative writing (for more details, check out her website: www.dykewomon.org).

I could go on. I could tell you how she started Lesbian Gardens, worked for the Women's Film Co-op, participated in the "great lesbian wars" of the 1970s, coordinated senior and disabled services for the SF Dyke March, and today serves on the San Francisco Public Library's Hormel LGBT committee and on the board of Fabled Asp (Fabulous/Activist Bay Area Lesbians with Disabilities: A Storytelling Project). "A long life in a short space" is how she puts it.

Any regrets? Only that some of her notebooks, kept since childhood, have "turned to compost in my basement, leaving me surprised to see how many reams of words could turn to dust while so much is still left to sift and sift."

Elana lives with Susan Levinkind, her partner of 21 years, among many friends in the SF Bay Area.