Roving Pack

Roving Pack

This morning I got the news that Roving Pack has been selected as a finalist in the Rainbow Awards – very very exciting! Roving Pack was an incredibly fun and challenging book to write and not only stretched me as an author and storyteller, but has opened so many doors. Above all, I’m thrilled that readers have connected to Roving Pack. This novel has far surpassed the hopes I had for it in really exciting ways, and being a finalist for this award is just one piece of that. Regardless of which book ends up winning the Rainbow Award to have it selected as a Finalist is absolutely thrilling! Get your own signed copy of Roving Pack (or ebook) here 

Sassafras’ new anthology Leather Ever After was selected as an Honorable Mention in the Rainbow Awards

This weekend I had one of the most unique and special experiences of my career; I had the chance to SKYPE with a book group and talk about Roving Pack. Now this wasn’t just any book group, this was a youth book group at SMYRC – the Sexual minority Youth Resource Center in Portland Oregon, the same queer youth center where I grew up as a queer teen. To have this kind of partnership with the agency where I was an alumni was incredible.

This summer, the youth at SMYRC and an LGBTQ group at Outside In – an amazing homeless youth serving agency and clinic (where I got medical care for years as a teenager) read Roving Pack.  I was so excited that the youth and staff at SMYRC wanted to read Roving Pack! Roving Pack is fiction though pieces of it definitely are based on who I was as a youth in Portland, and QYRC the fictional Queer Youth Recreation Center definitely bears a strong resemblance to the SMYRC I knew in the early 2000’s.  I was so curious what the SMYRC youth of today would think about the novel, its themes and what kind of questions they would have for me!

The youth at SMYRC asked some of the best and hardest hitting questions I’ve ever gotten about the novel.  They wanted to know about so many things including:

Gender portrayals

How much of the book is based on truth

If I had been concerned about writing a book with so much BDSM content

How I felt about the Daddy/boy relationships in the book not always being healthy or positive portrayals

What the writing process had looked like

How people I’d known as a youth in Portland had responded to Roving Pack

Why I ended the book the way that I had- what happens to Click

If I’d been concerned straight people wouldn’t understand the queer language/themes

I also learned about what their favorite scenes from the book were, or scenes that had otherwise stayed with them in some way and was interested to se that some of them were some of my own favorites.

SMYRC has moved twice since I was a youth, the space is completely different, and I was so grateful to be welcomed back into the new SMYRC and to have the chance to answer questions about Roving Pack and to talk with the current generation of youth who call SMYRC home. I’ve been so blessed that in the last year I’ve had a number of opportunities to connect with youth in Portland from keynoting the Oregon Queer Youth Summit in the late Spring to now getting to have a much more intimate conversation with youth.

Before getting on SKYPE Saturday night I was more nervous than I normally am before I talk to readers. I’m always nervous before I meet readers, but this was different, it felt like such a tremendous full circle to be visiting SMYRC the place where I wrote my first stories, where I built my first queer families and honestly I was terrified that the youth might hate the book, or not have related to it. It was so exciting to have such an engaging conversation with the folks at SMYRC, to have the chance to go back and visit them, to talk to youth who had read Roving Pack was an incredibly special experience for me not only as an author, but also personally. I owe my life to SMYRC in so many ways and it’s a tremendous honor to now be able to connect with the SMYRC youth of today.

Has your book group read Roving Pack? If so please get in touch I’d love to join your group via SKYPE!

A few months ago I shared with you some pictures from an amazing Roving Pack reader named Michelle Brennan who had felt so connected to the novel that she made a “book in a box” style diorama of the novel! I had completely forgotten about the book in a box reports that so many of us created in elementary school and was over the moon with the idea that someone was bringing them back, and using it as a medium to represent really queer books!!! Michelle sent me some early photos of the diorama, which I shared on the block and was completely smitten.  Now though, I have to admit though, that was NOTHING compared to the magic that arrived in the mail last night!!!!

Michelle, the amazing queer artist who is behind the creation of the Roving Pack diorama is also an amazing tease – she wanted me to be surprised by the final piece so when she finished the diorama she didn’t send me any pictures.  I couldn’t believe it when I opened the box and removed all the packing peanuts. She captured everything about Roving Pack so brilliantly.

When I was writing Roving Pack I never ever could have imagined the outpouring of support and connection I would see from the community. This was a story that I knew needed to be written, needed to get out into the world. I hoped that perhaps it would connect with a few people, but I had no way of knowing that it would be so well received, that people would write me beautiful letters telling me how much they needed this book.  Messages, emails, letters and other communication from folks around the world who have felt connected in some way to Roving Pack is without a doubt the most meaningful praise/award/recognition I could receive and I really believe that I have the best readers ever.

The detail that Michelle packed into this this diorama is impeccable, I can’t imagine how many times
Michelle must have read Roving Pack to be able to capture everything from the main character’s tattoos, to the details of the apartment – floggers on the wall, the infamous black sheets, the little books that come off the bookshelf, which are all the titles of books that a queer kid might have had in the early 2000’s,  the zine on the floor that can be paged through, everything is just amazing.  When I first opened the box, I think I sat on the floor with the diorama for a good 20 minutes just looking at every single little detail and keep returning to it. To have someone make such amazing art, based on my art???? I can’t think of a higher compliment!

Here’s the thing, Michelle is also in a major battle against cancer right now and needs help from the community because we live in a society where people have to crowd source to survive the financial fallout of a major illness.  Do you have a couple of bucks (or more!) to throw her way?  Michelle is an amazing member of our queer community and we need to help her and her family gets through this difficult time without having to worry about how the bills are going to be paid. 

There’s something outrageously special about being honored by your hometown, to have the place that raised you up look at where you are and the work that you have done/are doing and not only respond positively, but honor you for it. I’ve had a lot of really special moments with the Portland, Oregon queer community in recent months.  I was asked to keynote this year’s Oregon Queer Youth Conference  and now the youth book group at SMYRC (the queer youth center where I grew up) is reading Roving Pack!!!

Amidst all of this I got the news that I had been selected as one of the 2013 Queer Heros NW by the Gay & Lesbian Archives of the Pacific Northwest and the Q Center!!!!! 

“We thank you from the bottom of our queer hearts, Sassafras – we know we can survive whatever the LGBTQ-hating adult world can throw at us, because you did” 

This is one of the most powerful compliments I’ve ever received. I’m humbled, and honored that my hometown thinks of me and my work so highly. The last two weeks have been an incredible whirlwind between this and the Lammys, I am even more committed to writing the kinds of stories that people can really connect with

I don’t have an MFA.  I am, at my core not only a community based writer, but a community educated one as well. As I said, I was a zinester; most of my writing skills have been picked up, or made-up along the way. For a while, especially when I was working on Kicked Out, this was something I was ashamed of, something I tried to hide. Somewhere about halfway through the Roving Pack manuscript I found the power in claiming that, and moved forward with the intentional decision to keep the raw and grittiness in my writing that I believe comes directly my creative roots. I write queer stories, explicitly with queer readers in mind, and as such I can think of no bigger honor at this point in my career to have received this kind of recognition from my queer literary community.

As I sit here looking at the beautiful blooming bouquet of flowers my partner Kestryl brought home as a surprise on Monday, my mindkeeps replaying snippets of the Lammys. From the moment I learned I had received the award, until the Lammys themselves I continued to use the word “shocked” to describe what it felt to know I was receiving such an award.  I still feel that way: the surprise that someone like me, from my writing background, could be at this place where the most important organization in queer literature believes that my work embodies “the future of LGBTQ literature” completely blows my mind. But, at the same time I walked away from the Lammys feeling like in one more way I’ve found a home, my queer literary home.

Nicola Griffith who (along with Trebor Healey) at the Lammys received the Mid-Career Award gave a beautiful acceptance speech where she talked about having always felt like an outsider be it because of her nationality, disability, and/or sexuality but that there, on that stage at the Lammy’s she felt as though she’d been welcomed home, as though she belonged within this queer literary world.  She said it far more beautifully than I am paraphrasing here, but her words resonated deeply with me.  This award means so much more to me than I have even fully understood, it’s a validation for the path’s that I have walked as a writer, and the stories that have come from that place.

We didn’t have long for acceptance speeches (with good reason these kind of award ceremonies are always VERY long) but I tried my best to pack in as many thanks as I could.  I discovered while writing the initial drafts of my remarks just how many people I had to thank, and how many seconds it takes to do that!  Most important for me was to thank Kestryl who for the past 9 years has stood by me and all of my creative projects, my chosen queer family, the authors that have in some way taken me under their wing – especially Kate Bornstein, independent feminist bookstores, the queer youth center that raised me up, and my first writing teacher Linda Hummer – who taught creativity and healing classes in the women’s studies department at my college (where I almost flunked out numerous times) she was the first person to tell me I was a writer, who handed me the books that have changed my life and shifted my career, who died right beforeKicked Out was published.  I also wanted to thank all of you who read my books and stories, who write me letters talking about how something I wrote really resonated with how you see and experience the world. You are my biggest inspiration to keep writing, and I wanted to say that from stage.

I’m so grateful that Kestryl was able to capture on video my acceptance speech so that I could share it with all of you

When I first began working on Roving Pack I conceptualized of the book as being outside of the general course of my work. I saw Roving Pack as a story that needed to be told, but in some ways separate from what I generally do. I thought of it as a fringe book, small project that would appeal to a small niche of the community. I didn’t expect the kind of widespread response that the novel and I received. I especially didn’t anticipate that I would fall so deeply in love with writing queer fiction. What began two and a half years ago, as a creative experiment has become my home, but also my future.

Now the work begins.  I’m so intensely grateful for the ways that my books have been seen and validated in such an official way. I never expected to be here, but now that I am I intend to take full advantage of every opportunity I’m given. This is not in anyway to say that prior to this award, or without this award I wasn’t driven to continue putting these kinds of queer stories into the world, I absolutely was. However, I would be lying if I said something hadn’t shifted within me as a direct result of receiving the Berzon Award from the Lambda Foundation.  This award is a validation it means that my work an I will be taken more seriously in the literary world, and as such I believe that with this award comes a responsibility. I must continue to be worthy of having received it.  I cannot be lazy; to write the easy story that is less threatening, or more comfortable (to me, or readers), and I must do what it takes to get those edgy stories out into the community and into the hands of the queers that need them. I see it as my obligation write the best and most dangerous queer stories that I can, and to continue to queer the future of LGBTQ literature in every story I write, and every book I publish.

It’s time to start writing……….