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We love good books, just like you do
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Welcome to Bywater Books
Dear Readers,
Happy New Year! It's going to be a year in which we publish new titles by some of your favorite authors, and also bring first-time novelists to your attention.
This month, we are turning the spotlight on Bett Norris. Her first novel, Miss McGhee, will be the first Bywater title to be available as an e-book — from February onward. (Yes, we'll let you know.) The sequel, What's Best for Jane?, will be published in the Spring.
In the last newsletter we announced the return of the Micro-Fiction Contest, a challenge to write a story in just 250 words. The winner has now been chosen; see Micro-Fiction Contest (below).
Finally, a heads-up: we will be tweeting in March, as part of Women's History Month. Join us now — twitter@BywaterBooks.
As always, we at Bywater strive to bring you the finest in lesbian romance, mystery, and literary fiction.
Till next time!
Kelly Smith
Marianne K. Martin
Val McDermid
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Bett Norris grew up in Alabama, making memories she understood only years later. Here's one, from 1965:
"That day, my mother told me that if there was any trouble at school, I should just come home. I didn't know what she meant. I was in the fourth Grade. Mid-morning, they came, long lines of marchers, right down the middle of the street, in silent formation. They marched to the schoolhouse door, where they were confronted and stopped by Max Woods, the elementary school principal. He stood with arms folded, and he wore a white, short-sleeved shirt with a tie. My classroom was on the very end of the building, so whatever transpired happened in silence for me. But the marchers turned away. I started crying. My teacher snapped at me, asked why I had burst into tears. 'My mama told me to come home,' is what I remember saying."
Just five years later, her school was integrated. But decades passed before Bett realized that it was Dr. King who had led the marchers. As she says now: "He was there, and I was there. We had met, my personal history intersecting with a piece of that movement, on that day, and I didn't know it."
In her writing, this is the point Bett returns to — that moment when personal lives spill into public history, and choices can be made. In her first book Miss McGhee, now available as a Bywater e-book, Mary McGhee can — and does — hide that she is a lesbian, knowing that this is a luxury not open to African-Americans. As Bett explains, "They could not hide who they were. That thought stayed with me as I began to think about and research the movement. In a way, that single perspective is what drove the writing of Miss McGhee."
What Bett also does in her writing is to celebrate "the work that women do. Women do the hard things. They bear the children, they carry the loads, women of color, lesbians, all women. They walked when the buses were boycotted. They send their kids to school when there might be trouble."
So yes, it was Bett's mother who got the first copy of Miss McGhee. She was a woman who raised nine children and "In her face, I saw the struggles of so many women who work and fight to raise their kids without help." Not surprisingly, she's Bett's inspiration:
"I write the things I write because of women like these, like my mother, who saw three of her children graduate from college; like Juliette Hampton Morgan, who killed herself; like Fannie Lou Hamer, and Rosa Parks, and Jo Ann Robinson, who actually started the bus boycott when the men wouldn't; and Lillian Smith and Virginia Durr, white Southern aristocrats who engaged when they had everything to lose, and did lose everything. Some of these women were lesbians."
And yet, as Bett notes, the role of lesbians in bringing change and shaping history tends to be forgotten: "Lesbians marched for the right to vote. They went to jail in protest. They fought for reproductive freedom. They did the hard slogging in the women's rights movement, fought for abortion rights and equal pay, and got shunned or left out, our own interests set aside. We did not get equal attention when it came time for our fights. The civil rights movement left us behind. The recent struggle over the right for gays to marry in California dissolved into a finger-pointing, blame-laying squabble when Prop 8 passed, many stating that blacks did not fully support this fight, blacks decrying the comparison of the gay rights struggle to the civil rights movement."
Bett — who once lived in a segregated housing project — now lives in Florida with her partner Sandy Moore, an artist: "She is simply the best person on the planet, and I am simply the luckiest." (And they don't have the right to marry.)
by Caroline Curtis
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Miss McGhee
by Bett Norris
Two women find love amid the stifling intolerance of a small southern town.
When Mary McGhee moved to a small Alabama town shortly after the Second World War she was sure she could change her life for good: a new job, a new place, a new life. But then she met Lila Dubose, the wife of her new employer and it seemed that she hadn't really left anything behind her at all. They were still there — desires she couldn't escape, fears she couldn't control, and attitudes that threatened her every chance of happiness.
Yet, Mary McGhee dared to challenge the belief that women had no place in business as she took over the operational reins of a neglected lumber empire and brought it into the new era of profitability. And in the face of homophobia and racism she dared to love a woman and openly provided jobs and financial aid for the blacks of her southern community. A true heroine of her time, Mary McGhee quietly faced her fears and the prejudice and ignorance around her to make a difference.
Set in the shadow of the civil rights movement, Miss McGhee is a sweeping tale of forbidden love in a turbulent time.
$13.95Lesbian Fiction 296 pp ISBN 978-1-932859-33-1
At fine stores everywhere
or order directly from Bywater Books. |
Every month, Bywater holds a Prize Draw! To enter, just answer a simple question. (It is simple: you'll find the answer on the website!)
All the correct answers will be thrown into a hat. The first one to be picked out will win.
This month's question is:
Which state did Bett Norris grow up in?
This month, the winner can have the Bywater title of their choice.
Send answers to us by e-mail at trivia@bywaterbooks.com or by post to the address in the righthand column above — see To Order Books.
Congratulations to our most recent winner, Karen from Colorado.
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| Cynn Chadwick and Napping Porch Press, along with Bywater Books, are delighted to announce the winner of our second annual Micro-Fiction Contest.
The winner was chosen by Colette Moody, author of The Sublime and Spirited Voyage of Original Sin, and the winner of the 2010 Lambda Award for Lesbian Romance.
Congratulations to Wade Berstler, of Florida, with his story Almost:
This was going to be the year. How many winters had it been that he stood inside his shop watching through filthy greased streaked windows, her skate amid the frolicking children on the big frozen pond just across the tracks? He didn't rightly know since no one in Little Bliss owned a calendar.
She was like a ballerina among the kids who looked like ponies trying to navigate a newly waxed linoleum floor. She took his breath away, and there wasn't much to take after all these years of smoking. He swore he'd give the cancer sticks up before he made his move, just another promise to himself he couldn't keep.
He never saw her with anyone. Bobby often wondered how someone so beautiful and sweet could not be spoken for. She'd always been more than cordial to Bobby when she came in for gas. At the holidays, she'd bring him by a plate of Christmas cookies, one year he came close to tears at the gesture. This was most assuredly the year.
Bobby tried his best to scrub the grit from under his fingernails. He donned the suit he bought for his mother's funeral. He dabbed on some Old Spice he saved for church. He looked in the mirror before he set out. His reflection asked the question, "What would someone like her want with someone like him?" He paid his image no mind. He might lose his nerve.
Poor Bobby didn't know he was coming back for her.
And congratulations to our runner-up, Annika Reinert of Germany, with her story A Little More Bliss:
The hour had been all about intercepting the cookies at that moment of their first lovely blush. The moment passed, they turned dark and, eventually, bitter.
The angel of the kitchen followed a trail of pine needles outside, where her husband was busy pouring gasoline on the tree in a muffled rage. The tongues of flame thawed his speech. "Might as well burn it all, eh, woman?" Smells of burning were behind and before her. Haltingly, a smile climbed her lips as he roared at her with more pleasure than he had felt all December long: "Santa isn't real, baby, Santa isn't real!"
And with that revelation, she walked back into her home. She cracked a Christmas bauble and poured him punch into the jagged film of silver glass. He took it for lack of a way to put it down. The woman laughed at him, but his rage was outside with the smoking stump. An amused burst of air escaped him like water from a demolished dam. As in a dance, she spun and took up another red glass ball from the floor. So light. She hurled the featherweight sphere at the stereo like a snowball. There, it shattered and finally shut up Billie Holiday, who enjoyed heartache too much. |
Congratulations once again to Lisa Gitlin. Her novel I Came Out For This? was chosen as one of the Top 10 LGBTQ books of the year by Richard Labonte for Book Marks.
Congratulations are due too to Mari SanGiovanni, who has been picking up awards for her (screen-)writing.
She has turned her first novel, Greetings from Jamaica, Wish You Were Queer, into a screenplay. In the past year, it was a Prelim-Finalist in the Creative Worlds Award Screenplay Competition, and a Top 10 Finalist in the New Hampshire Film Festival.
A second screenplay, The Sibling Rule, is the story of two women faking a lesbian marriage to keep their kids in school. All goes great until the two women fall in love… (That's the kind of story you can expect from Mari.) It reached the quarter-finals of NextTV Entertainment Writing and Pitch Competition and the semi-finals of both the BlueCat Screenplay Writing Competition and the Final Draft Screenplay Writing Contest. It was also a 2nd place tie for the comedy category of the Woods Hole Film Festival.
Mari has now landed an agent in New York to help get the screenplays into the right hands — to be made into movies. As she says, though: "I have learned in the movie biz that 'maybe' means no, and 'yes' means maybe … I have had some bites, but I'm still looking for the corpulent lady to sing!"
Here's hoping!
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Sally Bellerose
· will be reading from her forthcoming novel, The Girls Club, as part of the Forbes Library Local Novelist series, on February 2 at 7 p.m.
Forbes Library
Coolidge Room
20 West Street
Northampton MA, 01060.
For more information: 413 587 1017 or visit the website.
Cynn Chadwick
· has been invited by the Lambda Literary Foundation to read at Queer as a 3 Dollar Bill, a night of reading by 30 queer writers of both poetry and prose.
This is part of this year's Association of Writers and Writing Programs ( AWP) conference. This year it will be held in Washington D.C., held February 2-5. The event will be held on Thursday, February 3, at 7:30-10:30 p.m. at the Human Rights Campaign Equality Forum. 1640 Rhode Island Avenue NW, Washington D.C., DC 20036.
· will be part of the Queer Studies Conference at UNC Asheville, held March 31-April 2. Also attending will be Bett Norris and Joan Opyr.
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When they're not writing the books you love, your favorite authors are writing their blogs, creating websites, and updating their social networking sites.
Jill Malone
Marianne K. Martin
For her blog, click here.
You can also find her on Facebook, MySpace, and Red Room.
Val McDermid
For her website, click here.
Bett Norris
has two blogs. Click here and here.
You can also find her on Facebook.
Joan Opyr
For her website, click here.
Mari SanGiovanni
For her website, click here.
You can also find her on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter —
her user name is MariSanGiovanni.
Georgia Beers
has two blogs. Click here and here.
You can also find her on Facebook.
Lindy Cameron
For her website, click here.
Cynn Chadwick
For her website, click here.
Stella Duffy
For her blog, click here.
You can also find her on Library Thing and MySpace.
Elana Dykewomon
For her website, click here.
You can also find her on Facebook and Red Room.
Z Egloff
For her blog, click here.
You can also find her on Facebook and Red Room.
Marcia Finical
You can find Marcia on Facebook.
Katherine V. Forrest
For her website, click here.
Lisa Gitlin
is about to start blogging. Watch this space! Meantime, you can find her on Facebook.
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| To Order Books
Order online:
www.bywaterbooks.com
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1-734-662-8815
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Bywater Books
PO Box 3671
Ann Arbor MI 48106
click here to print order form
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