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
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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.
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