Product Description

Telling Moments collects contemporary short stories by a diverse group of twenty-four lesbian writers. Engaging themes of life and death, aging, motherhood, race, love, work, and travel, the writers offer brief glimpses into lesbian lives.
The stories are by well-known contemporary writers—Gloria Anzaldúa, Mary Cappello, Emma Donoghue, Jewelle Gomez, Karla Jay, Anna Livia, Valerie Miner, Lesléa Newman, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Ruthann Robson, Sarah Schulman, and Jess Wells—and exciting newer voices, such as Donna Allegra and Marion Douglas. There are also stories from performance artists Carmelita Tropicana, Peggy Shaw, and Maya Chowdhry. Anna Livia’s protagonist appreciates her mother’s artful garden creation. Ruthann Robson tells of a survivor of the health care system. In Marion Douglas’s story a teenager dances with an alluring classmate. Donna Allegra’s strong construction worker copes with the death of her mother. And Karla Jay sets her character forth to swim with sharks. Most of the stories are accompanied by an author photo, biographical sketch, and—a most significant feature—a commentary from the author on her writing process and the autobiographical nature of her story, illustrating the truth behind the fiction.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1676844 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-15
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From Booklist
Editor Hall sets out to open a "real" window into the lives of self-identified lesbians. Given the depth and breadth of "re-membering" and autobiography in the stories she has collected, many different realities are revealed. Writing with soft sensuality, Jewell Gomez recalls teenage passion that couldn't survive the culture of the times, and the deep mutual caring of two women, which did. Karla Jay's lean, elegant prose recalls youth as an impoverished writer taken up by a wealthy French baroness. A postscript marked "In Reflection," offering analysis of the tale and of the motivation for its creation, is appended to each story by its author; in hers, for example, Gloria Anzaldua explains that she didn't set off the Spanish in her story with italics because to do so would have emphasized a foreignness she didn't feel. This feature and a certain freshness throughout lend immediacy and authenticity that are all too rare in short-format autobiographical fiction. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From the Publisher
Terrace Books, a trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press

About the Author
Lynda Hall teaches in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. She is the editor of Lesbian Self-Writing and editor of and contributor to Converging Terrains: Gender, Environment, Technology, and the Body. Her work has also been published in various journals, including a/b: Auto/Biographical Studies and Journal of Lesbian Studies.