may 18. 2001 * J n t * 08.39
BOOKS
▼
assy, punky, raw, dirty, true and familiar.
These words immediately come to mind
to describe spoken word artist and author
Michelle Tea, as evidenced on the first
page of her book Valencia, just nominated for a
Lambda Literary Award:
“1 sloshed away from the bar with my drink,
sending little tsunamis of beer onto my hands,
soaking into the wrist of my shirt. Don’t ask me
what 1 was wearing. Something to impress
Whats-Her-Name, the girl I wasn’t dating. She
had a girlfriend, she didn’t need two. She need
ed someone to sleep naked with and share
some sexual tension, and for that position I
made myself available.”
So begins the liquid ride through Tea’s book
of inebriated lesbian avenging and sexy adven
ture. Her writing is charged with exhilarating
energy that appeals with a bang and claws its
way into your head.
This book does not fall short on girls—
they’re everywhere, on every page. We imme
diately encounter Petra and her violent, knife-
wielding safe sex; and Willa, the jaded poet
with eyelashes from here to eternity who won’t
"V ' ‘x t î Æ t , . '.
take her clothes off, even to fuck; and Gwynn,
the recreational wrist slasher; and Iris, the Pis-
cean boy dyke and careless heartbreaker.
Poetic and frantic, insightful and energetic,
this work brilliantly evokes the ups and downs
of tangled affairs, drugs and friendships in a
post-punk, urban dyke setting. Valencia is more
of a memoir, although it’s classified as fiction,
which, Tea explains in an interview with Just
Out, “kind of saves my ass a little bit.” I’m left
amazed that any one person has the stamina to
go through so much chaos in such a short peri
od of time.
Valencia is a fast read, only because I was
San Francisco au th o r
unable to put it down. I mean, this girl is so
and spoken w ord a rtist
wild, 1 vicariously was captivated by her adven
tures and left feeling a little bored with my life
mixes a lively brew
at the end. She shows us that in every nook
and cranny of life lurks a novel.
b \ H adley S c o n
But Tea also documents quiet moments
with insightful metaphor-driven prose: “Mov
ing toward my house with the windows open
“Every night she pressed knives to my throat,
wide like big mouths eating the sky. You could
or called me on the phone and invited me over
sit in the window and be its teeth, my favorite
to cuddle...and still 1 went home and wrote
place to be.”
poems about how it wasn’t enough. Something
W hat’s marvelous about Valencia is Tea’s
ability to relate her personal interactions with a gaped in me, stupid and puckered like the maw
of a fish, that ugly.”
tremendous amount of heart and soul, giving
Although Tea doesn’t hesitate to be brutally
the story the depth it needs to endlessly
honest about others, she doesn’t spare herself
engage. Further, she doesn’t overanalyze her
either. She brings the reader fully into the
world; that task is given over to the reader.
moment by explicitly conveying the intimate
Instead, she chooses to reflect on her actions
details of her own experiences—details that
and let the reader know how she feels about
resonate with the sometimes gawky exploration
things as they unfold.
Here, Tea reflects on the gnawing emptiness of life that every reader can relate to.
“The awkwardness of not knowing some-
she experiences with one of her girlfriends:
Eager nominee
Michelle Tea
will be seeing stars
at the upcoming
Lambda Literary
S
Tea partv
m
ÊÊÈ
ones
body, I had no idea
what to do. I shoved my fingers
into her. You can do it harder, she said, and I
did. These girls. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t
hurting her. I remembered Petra, the last place
my fist had been. The vagina is not a delicate
place, I was learning this slowly.”
Tea now is working on a 400-page book
called The Chelsea Whistle. She says it deals
with "family stuff, childhood and adolescence.”
Even when she talks about her writing process,
it feels like one of her books.
I &.V \ V' / >
“I still am figuring out how to structure my
time better. But another thing for me then—
this was like five or more years ago— is that 1
was just a total experience junkie. I wanted to
have tons of sex with tons of different girls
and figure it all out, crack the big mystery of
the body, live like a flapper in Paris or some
thing. And that particular energy was really
feeding my writing at the time, so once I set
tled into a single girl, the momentum would
cease a bit and the inspiration would fizzle. It
depends on where you’re writing from. 1 was
writing from this place of kind of being the
tragic lone wolf, wronged by girls, which is a
fine place to write from for a minute, but you
can’t live there forever.”
W hen asked what she would be doing if she
wasn’t writing, Tea responds: “I don’t have
much skill or interest in anything besides writ
ing. I can read tarot cards— maybe 1 would
have gone deeper into that and really honed
my psychic ability and made a few guest
appearances on Unsolved Mysteries.”
Tea is also the co-founder of Sister Spit, a
women’s spoken word group from San Francis
co that came into being in 1994. She describes
the catalyst that drove it to life:
“Me and Sini Anderson, who also started
Sister Spit, liked going to the drunken,
belligerent boy open mikes and yelling at
everyone to shut the fuck up before we
read and heckling the stupid boys trying to
be Bukowski. But we knew the city was
filled with girls who would not want to deal
with that to read their poems, and who
could blame them? So we made a space
where they’d be listened to and appreciated,
without having to crack a beer bottle over
someone’s head. [So] Sister Spit came into
being...as a weekly, girls-only alternative to
the male-dominated spoken word scene in the
city. It was always free, and though everyone
was welcome in the audience, it was girls only
on the stage— and girls includes tranny girls
and tranny boys, too, for that matter. However
you’re ‘girl.’ ”
Tea will not be with Sister Spit during its
next go-round in Portland as she will be at the
Lambda Literary Awards ceremony in Chica
go. Yippee! Good luck, girl! J H
SISTER S pit will perform twice at Portland State
University: a benefit for the Hambleton Project
7 p.m. May 30 in the Smith Ballroom and a free'
tO'Students show 7 p.m. May 31 in the Muldcul'
tural Center. Tickets are $7'$10for the benefit,
but no one will be turned away for lack of funds.
HADLEY S cott is a Portland free-lance writer
who hopes all the gals who read this book are
inspired to raise some hell.
m
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