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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (July 5, 2002)
itting beside a lake in the French Alps 19 years ago, Annie Dawid made the decision to devote her life to writing fiction. She was reading the comments of a profes sor at San Francisco State University on one of her short story submissions. “Michael Rubin, a gay man who would later die of AIDS, wrote.. .powerfully of the great sacrifices and hardships in the life of a writer,” Dawid remem bers. “I decided I wanted that life.” Now a professor of English literature at Lewis & Clark College as well as its creative writing program director, the author has pub- jished two books. Her latest, Lily in the Desert, a collection of 12 stories, offers a glimpse into the lives of myriad characters. With stories ranging from a Holocaust refugee to a family struggling to survive the murder of their daughter to a gay man and a lesbian exploring their identities, Lily covers a broad spectrum of themes. Dawid paints vivid pictures of the young and the old, male and female, gay and straight, Jewish, Palestinian, Episcopalian and Catholic. All the stories, she says, are inspired by recently acquired notions of faith and spirituality. vZecul me/ S Continued from Page 27 a fear and loathing of men who behave “less manly than desired.” Bergling spent mote than a year interviewing hundreds of men. He scoured personal ads and message hoards for input and even devised online personae “with a definite femme bent” to sign into various chat rooms and experience reactions. Sadly, he finds many of the most sissyphobic atti tudes come from within our own community. The discoveries he makes are not surprising but are disturbing and thought-provoking nonetheless. For instance, he explores the cor relation between sissyphobia and misogyny and finds that mens attitudes toward femmes mir ror their attitudes toward women. While reading the hx>k 1 found myself angry at our community’s lack of acceptance despite our calls for equality. At other times I was moved to tears by heart-wrenching stories of verbal abuse. I even found myself examining my own feelings and behaviors and questioning whether I am part of the problem or part of the solution. Sissyphobia is a short fxxik that takes us on a long journey— from prejudice to understanding to acceptance. A writer to look out for, Bergling is working on another book about ageism within the gay community. — Floyd Sklaver A B lind M an C an S ee H ow M uch l L ove Y ou El. by Amy Bloom. Vintage Books, 2001; $ 12 softcover. HO* ¥ f’C H S , I .1 -HiVE VOI* f eading Amy Blcx>m feels like peering AMY BLOOM through the kaleido scope of the human Pti i'r -\-v\ 5 x #. W ¡Ü heart. In the critically acclaimed A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, eight short stories unveil a wealth of human connections. Bloom zooms in on the organic gamut of love surpassing multiple colors, classes, gen ders and varieties (gay, straight, sibling to sib ling, parent to child, stepmother to stepchild, stranger to stranger). These are not conven tional, comfortable love stories. Boundaries are casually pushed, taboos sharply mapped, Continued on Page 2 9 Sime 19 X 5 he daughter of a Holocaust survivor who fled to China, Dawid inherited a staunch atheism from her father. “Between my father and [Elie Wiesel’s Night], I was pretty much sold on atheism as the only way you could live in the world,” she says. But in 1996, the teacher rediscov ered her own spirituality while on sab batical in Colorado’s Sangre de Cristo mountains, where she spends her sum mers writing. During a time of great per sonal struggle, she felt solace and power there. Finding herself moving away from atheism, she began work on Lily. The birth of her son, Isaiah, in 1999 also inspired Dawid’s sense of faith and hope. “I think of faith as any kind of belief system that keeps you alive,” she asserts. “When I had Isaiah, life further changed because I became a hopeful person.” Although readers tend to assume differently, only three of the 12 stories have a direct auto biographical connection. Other than this “autobiographical triad,” she says she can’t claim personal experience has informed the work. “O f course,” she muses, “all fiction has elements of the author’s character, just as our dreams, as some would have it, contain our many facets in all their elements." “Reasons to Live Through This Year,” “The Man Who Remained Upright” and “Moses at St. Cloud" all involve her experiences as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. 90.7 PORTLAND NEW S, PUBLIC A FF A IR S AND A rime [3<awiel ç lcrbeçt w o t I í redefines- fdith S arc ih I_eimert Annie Dawid at home "My own experi ence as a Jew has been free and easy,” she says, “but I’ve somehow been able to understand that horror translated through my father.” Her relationship with Dad plays a prevalent role in her writing. Her interpretations of his struggles— during and after the Holocaust— are quite moving. “I define faith as a belief system which allows one to keep on living,” Dawid says. “For some of the characters it is traditional religion; for others it is faith in family, in history, in love, in politics.” Faith is also explored through sexuality, especially in "Whatever You Two Call Your selves." In this story, a young lesbian and an older gay man are introduced and begin to share an unlikely friendship. “My own sexuali ty is flexible,” Dawid notes. “I write about characters who inhabit all parts of the spectrum. Gay, straight and-bisexual characters in the col lection struggle with the expression o f self through sexuality.” Most of the tales in Lily have appeared previously in journals, and sev eral have earned awards. The open ing story, “Faith,” won the 1999 Ray mond Carver Short Story Contest. Other honors include the 2000 Permafrost prize for with son Isaiah “Whatever You Two Call Yourselves,” the Writers-at-Work prize for “On Crete” and the American Fiction prize for “The Settle ment,” which also won the Northwest Andres Berger Award for Fiction. Dawid’s 1993 novel, York Ferry, which she dedicated to the professor who inspired her to write, follows a couple of decades in the life of a small-town family. She is finishing up a new book, And Darkness Was Under His Feet, a fic tion based on her paternal family history, which will cover the entire 20th century— through Europe, China, Communist Romania, the«United States and Israel. Already, she’s planned her next project: another collection of short stories, Hippie Ruins, based on her summertime commune in south ern Colorado. jn SARAH L eimert is a Portland free-lance writer. GLASS ROOTS STAINED ¿iLASS-MOSAlC-STEPPIN^ STONES MUSIC T H A T YOU WONvT HEAR IGRANITEI BLOWOUT! AN YW H ER E E LS E . 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