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Change Must Be Made, Not Awaited

As I write this, 14 people are reported dead in a San Bernardino, California shooting, and bomb squads still are clearing the developmental disability facility where the murders took place. I am not acclimated to such news–how could anyone ever be?–but the sorrow no longer comes as a surprise.

I’m proud to be an American, and I always will be: Our country was founded with unprecedented good intentions. But that doesn’t mean I’m proud of America in its current incarnation. Greed; violence; malignant ignorance; and only the wrong sort of resistance. Today my heart hurts and my brain is on fire.

Q&A: ‘Danish Girl’ Author David Ebershoff

I caught up with David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl, about Lili Elbe, one of the first known recipients of gender reassignment surgery. This 2000 historical novel won a Lambda Literary Award and has been adapted into a film starring Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander.

LISA ROSMAN: Let’s first establish your resume. In addition to being the author of The Danish Girl and other notable books, until recently you have been the vice president and executive editor at Random House. But now you’re just going to focus on writing.

DAVID EBERSHOFF: That’s right.

LR: Don’t you like the way I say just? Like that’s just all you’re going to do!

DE: [Laughs] Yes, for a long time I had two careers and I decided it was time to scale back to only one.

LR: I remember reading in Publisher’s Weekly a few years ago about how you couldn’t really imagine not having a day job. What was the shift there? Continue Reading →

Grateful to be Grateful: Thanksgiving 2015

For as long as I can remember, Thanksgiving weekend has been difficult—often the most trying time of the year. In general, I have never been much for official holidays. Valentine’s Day is drek; the “parent holidays” are the emotional equivalent of an emergency root canal; New Year’s Day is amateur hour layered upon the fake birthday of Jesus. I even find Groundhog’s Day to be unhappily charged, though this stems from a personal coincidence.

But Thanksgiving has always loomed as the worst.

It’s not just that it is a blithe celebration of the worst strain of colonialism. It’s not just that a yearly gratitude practice rings as false as a Hallmark sympathy card. (Gratitude is a daily—hourly!—value in my cosmology.) It’s that no other day is so much about biological/nuclear family, and I became a conscientious objector to these institutions for very real, very painful reasons. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy