BETSY KALIN:

Hi, Elana, this is just such a pleasure for me to be able to interview you. I'm really looking forward to this.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Thank you. That's great.

BETSY KALIN:

well, I am a disabled Jewish lesbian

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Okay. I got maybe 30 years on you, but

BETSY KALIN:

So I just, I'm told to remind you to look at L three.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Okay.

BETSY KALIN:

So is that that way? Okay. All right. So as engaging as I am, try not to look too much at me.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Okay. I will try.

BETSY KALIN:

All right. So can you start just by saying your name and your date and place of birth, please?

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

My name is Elana Dykewomon. My date of birth is 10/11/1949, and I was born in Manhattan

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

at Flower Fifth Avenue hospital.

BETSY KALIN:

Great, thank you. Can you tell me a little bit about growing up? What were your parents like?

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I'm gonna combine those first three questions.

BETSY KALIN:

Sure, of course.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

My parents were high achievers. My father

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

actually fought in the Israeli army, which is not something I am now happy about, but he did, but it was right after the war. They had a different idea about Zionism than we have now. My mother was a researcher for Time Life and also the secretary of a smuggling ring to Israel.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

She put my father through some years of law school and they moved to Long Island when we were pretty young, and then they moved to Puerto Rico when I was eight. My youngest brother was about less than a year old, 10 months old, maybe. The first woman I fell in love with

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

was my nursery school bus driver. I knew right away from the beginning that I was different than the other girls. I thought it was just a personal peculiarity, and then I realized it wasn't. Somehow I had an image of lesbians and I don't know where I got this image from because we were living in Puerto Rico and maybe it was at

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

some kind of news rack or something, some novel about lesbians with the leather jackets. But I thought that if you were a lesbian, you were consigned to live this terrible, awful life. Although when I was young, my relationship with my parents was somewhat fraught, I think it mostly had to do with moving to Puerto Rico, so there was no

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

possible place to go. From there, I mean, I couldn't swim to New York, try to live with my grandmother who lived in Manhattan. This feeling of just being totally an outsider, which was very difficult for me. Those things combined,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

my parents took me to see Death of a Salesman when I was 10, a little early, and I realized that people could kill themselves, so I decided on that course of action. There's a quote in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam about how the Potter's hand trembled, when the Potter made me, and I looked to that quote as being justification

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

for being thrown back in the fire. I was being molested, and for my parents, when I woke up, I took a massive overdose that really should have killed me. I was in a coma for quite a while. I don't know how long really. I had to have a tracheotomy because I developed pneumonia from lying still for so long. When I did finally wake up,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I told one, my parents' friends that I was being molested by this guy at the San Juan hotel in exchange for comic books and candy. They got him fired, but it was convenient for them reason why this happened, but they sent me to New York, to Columbia Presbyterian,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and they were gonna send me to a residential center. At the residential center, they asked me if I was a sadist and I mean I was 11, 12 years old. I had no idea what say this was, I barely had any idea what a homosexual was. I said, you have people here who like to do that. I was like, no, don't send me with girls who like to pull the legs off spiders. I pretended that I was fine

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and I went home and I started saving pills. Oh, I know this was the second attempt. The second attempt was when I was in the coma for so long, the first attempt I was on the roof of the San Juan Hotel. And they took me down and all these things ensued. I started saving pills and then I took the massive overdose, and then I went to Johns Hopkins and I was at the mental hospital part of Johns Hopkins

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

called Phipps Clinic for a year, a month and a day. I was going to public school, which was a long commute from Johns Hopkins for about half of it, then I was in a halfway house that was terrible, for most of the rest. And then I stayed with some cousins for a while.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

By then I was 14, maybe, that was the last summer I spent at home, 13 or 14. My parents tiptoed around me, so basically I left home when I was 11 and left a kind of family life when I was 11, then I went to boarding schools. The first school I went to was a Quaker friend school,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and I got kicked out, not invited back. They tried to kick me out midyear, but the faculty was kind of divided on whether I was a great person or a terrible person. Anyway, I was not invited back. I went to a school called Windsor Mountain, which I did not know until much later when I was an adult and some people

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

were making a movie about it, that it was founded by German refugees from the Holocaust who had had a school in Germany. It was a remarkable and very interesting place in many ways. It was one of the most integrated that I've ever been in for any period of time.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

There were people from all over the states and all over the globe. Bondy's who ran it, they were kind of old school in lots of ways and had progressive ideas and others that the students should control the punishments for other students

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and deal with cases of misbehavior in both a student court and a lesser body that gave you demerits or time to do something, if you miss breakfast for too many times. But we had one kid, a US congressman's son who pulled a knife on another kid. Student court decided to expel him, and the Bondy's said, "No,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

we're not gonna expel him. His father's too powerful." So we didn't but it was an incredible place. Heinz, the headmaster, I believe I can say this, was addicted to Jake drops. Max Jacobson was a European refugee, like the Bondy's,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and he had a practice with many famous people where he gave them Vitamin B shots mixed with some form of speed right into their bellies. At one point Eddie Fisher took an ax, and completely destroyed Max Jacobson's library.

BETSY KALIN:

Is this where you met your first lover?

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

It is where I met my first lover. I'd had kind of miserable one night adventures with other women before that, but I met my first lover there at their school.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I went to Reed college and she went there with me. We spent the summer in Boulder, Colorado first, and then we went to Reed. She is still one of my very best friends. She's come and seen me through this cancer journey a lot of times. She lives in Massachusetts. She's been here three or four times so far. She was here the night my lover died,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

my last lover died. She was here when I needed to pick out a gravestone. She's just been there for me in a very solid way, all throughout our lives. She came when my mother died in New York, to the funeral and like that. Anyway, she's been a good friend to me these many years. My first novel, Riverfinger, was kind of a romantic clef about us. Though, certainly not everything in it was true.

BETSY KALIN:

How did you begin to find other lesbians or lesbian community?

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

It was hard at first. I mean, the first year I was at Reed, there was no such thing as a lesbian community. Then we went to Chicago for a year, so she could go to school doing photography.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I met a lesbian in my creative writing class who was very butch, and she said, "Why don't you come home to meet my old lady?" I thought she meant her mother, but it wasn't her mother, her old lady was wearing pink baby dolls, and she was the only lesbian I met until I went -- My first lover and I broke up

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

after that winter in the summer. She went east and I went back to Reed. When I went back and I saw it more clearly, I was like, I don't want to be here anymore, but I was there for the year. A woman started a homophile association, she'd been to New York and she'd been into some of the clubs.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Of course, I went to the homophile association right away. That's how I first met other lesbians. Over winter break, she told me where to go in New York, which was Cookies, an old time lesbian bar, where the mafia was there. I guess the drinking age must have been 18 in New York, though it said you have to be 21 to enter. Because I just showed my regular ID and they looked at me

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and they let me in, or else you just had to be butch to enter or something. But anyway, I went there a couple of times. I was in that old school lesbian bar scene for a little bit, very short amount of time, and then I went to California Institute of Art for my last year and I convinced them to graduate me after three years of college,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and I started a gay liberation. By then I knew what gay liberation was, a gay liberation organization with a gay guy I knew from Reed who also went there. What ended up happening with that organization was that it was all gay men. All of the lesbians went to hang out with Deena Metzker

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

who was teaching a course, I guess, on myths or something. They didn't want to be recognized as lesbians. So I was making coffee for a bunch of gay men, and I decided that wasn't any fun. I did meet some lesbians along the way, because I wore the gay liberation button. There was a lot -- Like my main poetry teachers said that

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

the guy who invented the orgone box, I forget what his name is, he was an adherent of that guy and his theories of poetic energy. He said that in the homosexual poetic energy was all bottled up. It was so armored, yourself was armored. And of course, they didn't know what they were talking about, neither of them, and they certainly didn't know from lesbians.

BETSY KALIN:

You started writing the novel at Reed, can you tell --

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I started writing the novel at Cal Arts. I was writing since I was a little child. My first grade teacher called my mother in and said I had written, my parents had a couple of these Chinese dogs and turquoise lacquer that they'd gotten for wedding presents.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I remember being very attached to them and having this whole fantasy life about them. I wrote a poem about them and the teacher said to my mother, "Why did you write this poem for your daughter?" And my mother said, "What poem?" I was in first grade then. I've been writing all along. I've been writing stories and poems and sketches of my classmates.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I started writing Riverfinger when I was in college. The last year when I was at Cal Arts, I had a teacher, Emmett Williams, who was friends with Maurice Girodias, I think that was his name, who was the first publisher of Henry Miller, and he encouraged me to write a novel and send it to Maurice Girodias, and I did, the summer after I was at Cal arts. I was at

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

an artist retreat called Cumington community of the arts in Massachusetts where my high school -- Not where my high school had been located, was about 50 miles away. But my high school had been in the last two years at Windsor Mountain had been in Lennox. I was at this artist's retreat, I turned over my truck on the gravel road.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I ended up staying in Massachusetts with some old high school teachers of mine who were good friends and I borrowed their Jeep and drove into Northampton. There, I saw above 200 main street, a big rainbow. I thought, I wonder what that is. It turned out to be the valley women's center. I started hanging out at the Valley Women's Center.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

That takes me up to 1971/72.

BETSY KALIN:

Can you tell me more about the Valley Women's Center and your involvement with it and what that experience was like? Because it sounded like you had a little bit of like lesbian feminist awareness, but not that much until Northampton.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Yeah. That's true.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

At the Valley Women's Center, we were getting all of the publications from all over the country. I mean, by then, of course, there was no internet and there was phone -- long distance phone calls cost a lot of money. We communicated on paper

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and we got all the periodicals and magazines and stuff. There was a group of us who were going to start a women's Institute. Pat Zachary, who had graduated from Smith and ended up living in the area, was a straight woman, and she had all of these really big ideas and went to

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

all of these foundations, which even though she was like, totally what you would call a presentable straight woman. She looked a little like Gloria Steinem, but not. She was very good looking, handsome woman, not at all dykey. She went to these places for foundation and all those places

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

laughed in her face. We had a site all picked out to work on and everything and get all these plans for it. The only thing that really happened was a small group of us went down to New Haven at the request of a group in New Haven that had begun distributing women's films. They wanted us to take it over, so we took it over

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and we had their films and we called it the Women's Film Co-op and we made a great catalog. I wish I had a copy of all of the women's films and where to get them. This is 1973, maybe '70, probably around '73. It had pictures of us. We all went swimming naked in in the local river. It had pictures of us and they had pictures of old movie directors,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

female movie directors, and all kinds of stuff was a great catalog. One of the things I wish I had, although I have too much stuff, was a copy of that catalog. But anyway, we did that out of the Valley Women's Center. I was there a lot, fulfilling orders and corresponding with people and like that.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Then somewhere around there, 1974 Off Our Backs published the CLIT Papers and a couple of women showed up from Chicago who were very strong separatists and called up and said, "What's happening there?" I said, "Well, I'm your friendly neighborhood lesbian." The woman I was talking to said, "There is no such thing."

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

She's been my friend now since then, 1973/4. By that time we had lesbian gardens upstairs, we had a space that was -- I kind of invented it and I got somebody to do a mural on the wall and I put a little bookstore in it with books

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

that I got the names of from lesbian connection or that I knew about otherwise. We had the space, lesbian gardens, which the straight women were allowed, at that point, to come to, and then the lesbian separatists said, you should not allow the straight women to come here. It's a lesbian space, should have to be a lesbian space. Some of us agreed and some of us disagreed and we fought and fought and fought and fought and fought.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

We fought and fought about it, and other things along those lines and everybody was paranoid. It was also the time of the grand juries because Susan Sachs and Kathy Powers who were lesbians at the time, Kathy Powers eventually married a man and turned herself in, Susan Sachs stayed a lesbian.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

They had been involved in one of the armed revolutionary struggles. They may have been in Northampton briefly, we didn't know. But we were getting a lot of instructions about how to deal with summons to the grand injury and all that kind of stuff. My roommate at the time

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

had been at the [inaudible] brigade that went to Cuba and I had gone to Lexington, Kentucky to help organize the socialist feminist conference that happened in Yellow Springs in 1975. Kathy Powers and Susan Sachs had been verifiably in Kentucky,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

so we were scared all the time about the grand jury knocking on our door and the FBI tapping our phones and all that kind of stuff. We were very paranoid and we got to be paranoid about each other. I'd had a lover in Northampton, who I'm still friends with today and who comes down and helps me

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

regularly with cancer from Oregon. That took a lot of work on both our parts. During that period, I hung out with a separatist from Chicago and I decided they were right, and I became a separatist myself.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

It was a very contentious time, everybody was up in each other's business. We were in our early to middle twenties and we had no idea how young we were and how much old lover stuff and hormonal stuff was part of the mix of our calling each other out.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Cancel culture today seems pretty brutal from a distance, but we had cancel culture then too, we were canceling each other right and left. Some women started a lesbian coffee house called the Common Woman Club. I wouldn't go to it because they let men in and I fought with my ex-lover about it a lot.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Stuff like that. That was a lot of what happened then. I mean, before all of the separatists and paranoid grand jury stuff happened, we did a lot of stuff at the valley women's center. We did a lot of anti-war work. I published

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

a small book of poetry called women against the war, but there were many, many, many women involved in it. We went to do demonstrations in front of the Westover air force base. I think it was the Westover air force base. Got arrested and painted our faces white and did theater. Once, we went down to Washington

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and went to our congressman's office and did theater there, and made a circle around the Pentagon with Joan Baez and said various curses to make the Pentagon come down. Of course, that didn't happen until 9/11, and that wasn't what our curses called for anyway.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

We did a lot of activism, a lot of support for welfare mothers and various different causes, and the Valley Women's Center was a source of a lot of energy. Back then, we did a lot of energetic kinds of stuff down. But then when it kind of blew up -- And I had gotten into a very difficult relationship with a woman

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

who had had psychosurgery, and maybe as a result of the psychosurgery, though, it's not clear, she also battered me and she was smaller than I was, but I couldn't -- I mean, I had been on dyke patrol. We had something called dyke patrol where we learned from jujitsu experts, how to protect ourselves.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

We patrol both lesbian gardens and the place where there was a bar once a week for women. I did all my dyke patrol self-protection moves, but I wouldn't leave her. Finally, I just left. We had bought an old red truck that was remade by a shop teacher

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

into something like a primitive RV. I took off on that and I went down to where the pagoda was in Florida, it took me a while and I met my friend and former lover Dolphin, who's upstairs now, who's slept on the couch here with me every night since I got released from the hospital in September.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

She was traveling with a friend to the west coast. I decided to join them and kind of caravan to the west coast and Dolphin and said where I had to go talk to my mother. Really, she wanted to go to Puerto Rico. My parents were still living in Puerto Rico. So we did, we went to Puerto Rico. We came back

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and we had a pretty good time. Then because I'd been to the Oregon coast, when I was at Reed, I thought the Oregon coast was one of the most beautiful places that I'd ever been to. And it remains in my mind that, so I said, I didn't wanna live in California. I wanted to live on the Oregon coast, and so we did . We lived on the Oregon coast for about four years, but then it became way too racist

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

to endure. We moved down to the bay area. When we were on the Oregon coast, I got a CETA job. CETA was a program, I think that Jimmy Carter might have started, that gave Jobs

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

to people who were traditionally disadvantaged for one reason or another, or just institutions that didn't have a lot of funding. I applied for the job of printer at the Bandon historical society. It's a little historical society, but they had an old letter press and an old linotype machine. A linotype machine is like a Rube Goldberg invention,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

has little keys that you get into a line, as in line of type and it spurts hot led against the keys and makes the little bar, and then you can put them in a format that you can print from them. I learned how to use that, which was really a 19th century skill.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Although when I was learning, they were still using them for presses in South America and other places in the world. I don't doubt they still are, and set type by hand one by one from foundry type. I enjoyed that a lot, and I made stuff my own.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I learned, from being a printer, how to be patient, because it's not like today where you just click on things on the internet and make digital things happen. You had to, I mean, setting type letter by letter or even linotype line by linotype line, requires incredible patience

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and a kind of a sculptural imagination because the form that you get up to put into a letter press is very sculptural. It's got all these blocks of wood and type and everything, and then you have to tighten it and make sure nothing will slip, and you have to have it be very clear. It takes a lot of time to do it right.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

That was one of the great pleasures of living on the coast of Oregon, that I got that job. I was very happy with it.

BETSY KALIN:

Can I go back a little bit too?

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Sure.

BETSY KALIN:

I wanna ask you more about being a lesbian separatist and how you would define separatism.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

At some point, I thought that there were nine different kinds of separatism and I defined them and I've lost the paper on which I defined them.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

There were land dykes and there were political -- Different strains. I always considered my separatism -- Not always, because I did see, and I often do see men as a category being the enemies of women,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

if we say that we're suddenly castigated, but I mean right now while we're talking many, many rapes have happened across the world, the Russians have bombed the Ukraine because they let one madman control their country. We let Donald Trump control this country.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

There's a political way in which I see

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

men, the category, as the enemy. But really what I felt about my separatism was that what women hadn't got and what I thought women needed was to be loved for themselves to have some things that were just for them

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

that I was encouraged by reports of women's languages written into quilts and into various things that women in China had done that were in decipherable by men, but which women could read. I thought, well, that's what I wanna do. I wanna live my life loving women.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

That was really my major definition of being a separatist. I have a very good relationship with one of my brothers. I have a fairly good relationship with the other. I'm beginning to have good relationships with my nephews, but it's not about individuals.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

It's a systemic, it's about men having the power, men having the power to define women, to define what women do and can't do, and there are microaggressions or micro examples of that. Every time you do something with a guy in my experience,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

most of which are fairly easy to overlook or to correct as they go along. They're unpleasant, but they were never the focus of my separatism. The focus of my separatism was to make something good for women and to live my life primarily with women. That's how I would define it.

BETSY KALIN:

I think something else that you said that was really interesting to me was that you think now that separatism is one of the keys to doing coalition work.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I do think that I mean --

BETSY KALIN:

Can you repeat that? I'm sorry.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I do think that, I mean, in San Francisco we have a large and very diverse queer population and there are a couple of groups for black women

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and a group for Asian Pacific women groups for native American lesbians and groups for Latino lesbians and groups for lesbians interested in tech and all kinds of groups. This was really clear to me when I did the Dyke March that the women who came together to work on the Dyke March in San Francisco were from

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

really different backgrounds Latino women, black women, Jewish women, white women, women with really different disabilities and sizes and everything. We mostly got along and I attribute that a lot to there being spaces where women could be with

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

their communities of primary identification so that coalition work was just one of the things that they did out of those communities of first recognition

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and sometimes as emissaries of those communities, mostly as themselves. I think that the separatism of those communities, although they would not call themselves separatists by and large, but there's a community that's just for black queer women and a community that's just for Asian Pacific queer women

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

that they find community in these separate spaces. Then it makes it much more possible for them to feel like -- If those white women, I can't stand them, they can go back and say,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

you don't know what this white woman did to me and they get a lot of support and somebody would say to them, well, the Dyke March is important, go back and see what you can do about X or Y or Z. I don't think we had a lot of that going on at the Dyke March, but we might have had more than I noticed for sure at the time.

BETSY KALIN:

Well, I think something that was -- And remember not to look at me. I know it's hard not to do it. It's such a weird way to do it, I know. And if you could try to repeat what I'm saying in your answer that would be helpful and I'll remind you too about that. But was that the only separatist groups, and you listed a whole bunch of different groups, the only ones that are seen negatively

BETSY KALIN:

are the lesbian ones.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

That's true. I know what you just said was that the only ones that were seen negatively were the lesbian groups of the separatist groups. That was true, and that's still true today. The only groups that are seen negatively are lesbian groups. It's always been, and it still continues to be that when women decide

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

they don't want to have anything to do with men, they get a lot of shit for it. They just get a lot of flak. I have a friend, an African American writer, who I think would agree with me on most of these issues, but like if we go down to Saints and Sinners in New Orleans,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

she makes nice with all the gay men and all gay men love her. It's like, okay, fine. And she only opens up her life to people who she has a meaningful connection with. I think that when you say that you're a lesbian,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

you are saying you don't subscribe to at least most versions of male authority over you and men can't stand that. I mean, most men can't stand that, there are men who are perfectly willing to say right on. But generally speaking in our culture and in most cultures in the world,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

men just can't stand being ignored or having women turn away from them. I wrote a poem about this once. I was In a coffee shop with some friends and a guy asked us what time it was and we ignored him, and within five minutes he was calling us all busting bitches.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I mean, he really went all the way from 'we were having our own conversation, we don't want to be bothered with you' to whatever insults he could figure out to hurl at us because we weren't giving him the time of day. So yeah, I think that answers your question.

BETSY KALIN:

It does. Thank you. That's perfect. And then one other thing that we skipped over that I wanted to ask you about, when you published Riverfinger Woman, you published with a lesbian press Daughter's Inc. Can you talk about that a little bit?

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Daughter's Inc was great. I was so happy to publish with them.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

June and Patty were a trip. I spent this summer right when Riverfinger came out up in Plainfield, Vermont where they had a house, an old house. June had been married, heterosexually married, which was all that was available at the time, and had at least two daughters and a son who drowned, and she had quite a bit of old school money

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

from her marriage. She owned both a house in where that was, [Inaudible] but anyway where Goddard is and a townhouse in New York where the women's coffee house was and when they did their big announcement for their first list,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

they had this party that was off the charts. I mean, I've been at parties, something like, it since then, but it was all the New York literary lesbians of all kinds, Rita Mae Brown was there wearing cowboy boots, and somebody else was wearing a boa, and somebody else was wearing a tuxedo. I had put on my yellow quarter shirt,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

which I thought was the extent of finery for the time and had to come down with two friends, they had a bathtub full of champagne, so that was very cool. They were cool, but when I went up and I lived near them in Vermont, June was like, I don't talk to anybody under 50. I mean, she did talk to us younger folks

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

who gathered around her at various junctures. She was very didactic. She cut out about a third of Riverfinger Women after I rewrote it. I ended up being glad that she did the third that she cut out was terrible, but she didn't ask me, we never talked about it. She did the same thing to Rita Mae Brown,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

not so much with Rubyfruit Jungle, which Rita Mae Brown had kind of honed on the talk circuit, but with her next novel, June said that she basically wrote it. With some input for me to make, she was like that, she took control of projects and people's work and stuff if she thought they weren't quite up to

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Then she sold a section of Riverfinger to Harper & Row, at a time when I would not have wanted to be Harper

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and some big publisher. For a book called The Woman Who Lost Her Name, which was Jewish women's writing. I was like, you, who are not Jewish, picked out something that I never would've picked out to sell to a press I never would've sold to and never tell me. She never told me. I found out from somebody else who was included in the book, a book seller in Eugene, that this was happening.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I was like, how could you do that? She was difficult, she took control of whatever she could take control of.

BETSY KALIN:

Is there a problem with the battery or something?

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

No, I don't know what that is. Makes that noise every once in a while. Yeah.

Juan Raymundo Ramos:

Okay. Oh, is it on your end?

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I think it's on my end.

Juan Raymundo Ramos:

Okay.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

So that was June and Patty, and basically I love them. As time goes by, I love them more. Because the old things seem like they don't matter so much now as I'm coming towards the end of my life. I remember one time I went -- I didn't have a place to stay and I knocked on their door. June was off somewhere

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and Patty led me in and then we went and had hamburgers at a bar and we fell asleep across their bed with all our clothes on, red hamburgers and quite a few beers at some bar . We fell asleep with all our clothes on, across the bed. Like that, I remember these moments that were kind of sweet, that made a difference in the long run

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and stay with me. Yeah. But I felt lucky and I feel even luckier now to have published with them.

BETSY KALIN:

Great. Thank you. I wanted to hear about that. We just got you to the Bay Area and can you talk about starting a Jewish lesbian writing group?

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I didn't start it. I came down here, it was already started.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

When I entered it, it was a Judy free spirits apartment. There were a bunch of us in it and we did readings for the major holidays. We usually did at least one reading, and sometimes two, a year, if I recall, but we did two a year.

BETSY KALIN:

Can you say that it was a Jewish lesbian writing?

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Yeah. It was a Jewish lesbian writing group and we did readings for the Jewish holidays, Passover, Rosh Hashanah, Hanukkah,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

mostly those, once or twice a year, we might have done one for sukis once, I don't remember. I did get us back together once after the group had disbanded to do a reading at the Montclair women's club and somebody else got us together to do a reading at the take five cafe, while it was here, which were lovely events, both of them.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

There's not too much to say about it. We had a regular writing group except we were all Jews, so we had more or less Jewish exercises. Like, they say we are a stiff-necked people, write about that for 20 minutes, various topics that were both secular and marginally religious.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Most of us were secular Jews. Yeah.

BETSY KALIN:

But what is the importance for you? Because you've continued your Jewish lesbian writing and work, so what is the importance for you about that? Do you feel, even though you're secular, a connection to spirituality or is it a cultural connection?

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Well, about my relationship to spirituality, I feel a very personal relationship to spirituality.

BETSY KALIN:

I'm sorry, there was something that just banged.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I'm sorry. I moved the table a little bit, my foot. I feel a very personal connection to my spirituality, and mostly I feel like it's about poetry and about the poetry of

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

the daily and the ordinary and of the extraordinary and the political and all of those things are part of my spiritual understanding of the world. I think it's important to keep working as a Jew because it's one of my primary identities.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I mean, I had an ex-lover who died. Her mother said to her, "I would never go to a country club that excluded black people. I would never go to an event that excluded anybody." And she said to her mother, "How about if you went to a bar that excluded Jews?"

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

And her mother said, "They would never know." I was like, , well, they're always gonna know about me that I'm Jewish. I come from a Jewish background. My father was a Talmudic scholar and a descendant of rabbis, and my mother was

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

both a religious and a secular Jew and both of their parents, my grandparents, kept kosher and they experienced the Holocaust in a primary way. One of my best friends is a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I see in the United States that being Jewish is part of the vast conspiracy paranoia of the right wing that we've got people in Congress saying

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

there's Jewish space lasers. If the right wing could identify all the Jews, it would be much worse for us, and it could be much worse for us again. I feel like

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

being a Jewish lesbian and setting my identity primarily to that on the identity dial is really an important thing because so much of our identities are contested in other places, and so much of our identities

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

are disparaged in other places. I mean, there's a way that I feel like beyond identity, especially now as I come towards the end of my life. I feel more like a piece of rutilated quartz that can smile. I mean, I don't really feel gendered

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

or identity or any of that in my heart of hearts, I feel mostly like that's where the poem lives and that's where my love lives. That's where my friendship lives. Not necessarily in my identifications,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

but my identifications are important as I move through the world, and important for me to make clear to other people, because I feel like -- And I've had this experience when I feel like I'm identified as just a white woman

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and not having an experience of any kind of oppression as a fat woman, as a Jew, as a mental system survivor, as a fat woman that I'm not seen that easily, that I get glossed over. It's important for me to claim the various identities that I have

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and not gloss over them. Definitely, I am a Jew. I come from a very long line of Jews, and it's important to me. The seasonal celebrations are important to me too. I see them as seasonal, not necessarily religious, but part of making the world whole

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

in a certain kind of way. That's what I think of seasonal rituals as.

BETSY KALIN:

Beautiful. Thank you. Then we have Passover coming up and I have a lesbian 1970s Haggadah that I use. ,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

That's great.

BETSY KALIN:

A radical, political Haggadah that I make everybody read from.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

That's great.

BETSY KALIN:

You mentioned the San Francisco Dyke March

BETSY KALIN:

a little bit. Can you tell me more about that and what the experience was like?

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Well, my partner and I started working on it because --

BETSY KALIN:

I'm sorry, I gotta interrupt. Can you say the San Francisco Dyke March?

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Okay. My partner and I started working on the San Francisco Dyke March because we were going to it. We went to it a couple of years and we were really pointed in the disability access and we'd march a certain point and both she and I would get fatigued.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

This was already quite a few years ago, but we would get fatigued. There were other people in various, not people who were using motorized wheelchairs, but who were using fold up wheelchairs, they had to use their hands to use, who would get very fatigued, and other people who had disabilities. The original women

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

who were doing it, we call them the OGs, wanted to stop. My friend, Marilyn Cowman, got together a group of us, and Susan and I agreed that we would take over the disability and senior access, which we did. We were both very type A kinds of people. We were organized and I got the city to donate.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

It helps in San Francisco or got the city to donate a shuttle that we could use. And I got that because I knew a lesbian who knew a lesbian who was in charge of the shuttle services, like that. Susan got a discounted cable car facsimile thing

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

that people use in marches for people to ride in who could, they had to be able to step up a couple steps and we staked out a disability area in the lawn in Dolores park and set up markers and said no smoking in this area and blah, blah, blah. We set up a table on the march route in front of the gay and lesbian synagogue Sha'ar Zahav that had chairs and some refreshments

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

like carrots and cupcakes, or I don't know, sheet cake and bottled water for the old dykes. We did that for about eight years and then various things intervened and we couldn't anymore. We left a very good notebook of everything we had done. And yeah, it was fun to do. It was great.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

The Dyke March committee was very varied. There were women who were 40 years younger than us. I don't think anybody was older than Susan. Susan was eight years older than me, and there were all colors of people, of lesbians, working on it and various different abilities,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

really different abilities. It was a good time, we did our best at trying to provide the space for women who hadn't had spaces provided from them, which was both of our commitments to loving lesbians.

BETSY KALIN:

Great.

BETSY KALIN:

You were active in disability activism and what are some of the reasons that this was something that you undertook and are there any stories that you can give me about your activism?

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I can't really claim to be active except on the Dyke March and disability activism.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Although I have written letters and stuff -- Once I tried to go to this program right after one of my knees had been replaced and it was up a flight of stairs to get there and I couldn't make it up the flight of stairs, so I wrote them a letter. They apologized profusely and said they will do better in the future like that.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I mean, I got involved in trying to provide disability access and being aware of disability access because I had quite a number of friends who were disabled in different ways. Some used wheelchairs, some were too big to sit in regular seating

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

in movie theaters or community events. Some had hearing disabilities, more and more have hearing disabilities as I get older. Some have vision problems. My partner had dementia the last two years of her life, which was intense.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

We had the good fortune when her mother died to sell her mother's house and basically rebuild our house, so it was pretty much accessible. The bathroom was accessible and the halls were accessible all like that, which was really good when she developed dementia. But also we did it for our friends so that the walkway has a ramp coming up to the house and the stairs have chair lifts so that

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

our friends could come to the house and her clients could come to the house and we could have a party and not worry about whether people could it in or out. I found that in going around the country, doing readings and here in San Francisco that even my closest friends would say, well, so, and so's disabled, but I don't have to work about her.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I don't have to buy a house that's accessible. I don't have to build a ramp on my front steps. Then they needed those ramps themselves. They didn't have them. I mean, I don't understand that. I don't understand if you have the ability. I understand that some people don't have the ability, the financial ability

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

to make their homes accessible, but a lot of people do and don't even consider it. I was in Lincoln, Nebraska once, this woman had a disabled partner and she told me the story of, she had some friends who were building a new porch on their house and they thought, great, they'll build a ramp and we can come visit them. But nope, they didn't build a ramp. They just built the porch and you had to climb up a bunch of steps and her partner couldn't do that.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

They never visited them. And I don't get that. I don't get, if you care about people, even people in general, your family, your friends, if you are aware of all the aging process, why you wouldn't make your house as accessible as you possibly could. That's a lot of my disability activism.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I talk to people about it and I write letters and we did the Dyke March for a lot of years.

BETSY KALIN:

Great. Thank you. Do you need to get a drink of water or take a break?

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Some water.

BETSY KALIN:

Okay.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Yeah. I only have about a half an hour left.

BETSY KALIN:

Okay.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Before I have to do something for my treatment.

BETSY KALIN:

Okay, great. Can you tell me now about how your

BETSY KALIN:

fat activism got started?

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I saw in lesbian connection, when I lived in Northampton, that for a dollar, you could get a mimeograph sheets of fat activist positions. I got them and I hid them under my bed. I don't know who I thought was gonna come looking for them.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

When I came to the West Coast, there was a group that started, I think it was called Fat Chance in its first incarnations. Later, it was called Fat Lip. Judy free spirit was an important part of that, and several other people I knew vaguely.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I went to their first performance. I drove down from Oregon for it, with a friend of mine who was fat and it was mind blowing. They were just talking about their lives and things they had in common, reading, little skits and stuff. It was a really great night.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Then I became lovers with tree free spirit, and I followed up on that. I mean, I did what I could and sometimes not enough to make the world more accessible for her. I participated in some demonstrations and various things

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and I wrote essays. Mostly, I wrote essays. I wrote an essay called Traveling Fat, that was in a couple of anthologies at the time, which must have been in the mid-eighties. Then my friend, Esther Rothburn, who edits the journal of fat studies and the Journal of lesbian studies,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

had me write a couple of essays about fat activism that I wrote because she asked me to, so those are out there. That's what most of my fat activism has entailed besides just being in the world. I taught at San Francisco state for --

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I don't know, 12, 14 years, and there I was fat Jewish lesbian and I'd write my name in their catalog because it was my legal name. They'd have to have my legal name there, but I'd get on the Blackboard the first day, and I would say my legal name is in the catalog, but this is the name everybody knows me by and I'd write Elana Dykeman on the board and three people would leave and then they were always three more people to take their place because

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

the sections were always over-subscribed. I had a good time teaching. I mean, it wasn't like I had a bad time, teaching was great. Occasionally, I'd get guys who might be Trump supporters today, and they would try to rankle me and I'd say, I'll have to look that up. it was just like that anyway.

BETSY KALIN:

Can you tell me about changing your name and then changing the spelling the second time?

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I decided to change my name in 1975, It was a very different time. Everybody was changing their name. I didn't like my first name. I didn't want to change it to Marigold or something like that, but I didn't like my last name, my patronymic.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I didn't like being associated with my father and the long line of rabbis behind him in such a clear way. I made myself a little joke about it, about how nobody named Dykewomon would ever get reviewed in the New York Times, which is true. Although I have to say

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

that Riverfinger Woman, when Patty and June published Riverfinger Woman, they said it was a lesbian book. They did not say that, ran a full advertisement in the New York times, and they said that the only book they said was a lesbian book was Riverfinger Woman. They didn't say it about Rubyfruit Jungle, they didn't say it about anything else. That's the only New York Times distinction I have anyway.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I didn't wanna be famous, I wanted to be a cultural worker in my community. I wrote an essay about it. It's in -- I don't know an anthology that came out of Canada that Betsy Warland was one of the editors of. I can't remember its name right now, but the essay says everything I have to say about it, which isn't really,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I mean right now, that's all I really wanna say about it. I changed my name then and I changed the spelling when everybody was changing the spelling of woman, woman, woman, woman, woman, woman, and I like the singular M O N better than the M A N, so I use the singular M O N and that's it.

BETSY KALIN:

Okay, great. Thank you.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

You're welcome.

BETSY KALIN:

Could you talk about your other books

BETSY KALIN:

or other writing that's important to you?

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

The best book I have written is beyond a doubt Beyond the Pale. I spent a long time researching and writing it. I was very absorbed in it. I went to a bunch of writing retreats and worked on it and then I rewrote it according to what my editors. I was very lucky to get it published. I've been lucky.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

The presses that I wanted to publish with in the US didn't want it. They already said they had too many Jews, in so many words, on their lists, but I did a reading in Seattle, and one of the women, I think one of the editors of bridges actually came to the reading and told the woman who was

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

a theatrical storyteller about it, or maybe the theatrical storyteller came and she went and told the section of the book that she wanted to use as a story in her storytelling proof performance, and performed it in Vancouver. The women from press gang in Vancouver saw it and wrote me a letter and said, "If you have a whole book, we'd like to publish it."

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

At that time I was feeling pretty discouraged and they were very encouraging. They published it in Canada, the audiences are much larger and much more appreciative, generally speaking. I mean, if you're not Louise Erdrich, for instance. But had really big audiences

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

in Canada and it did really well in Canada and then they closed that down and they sold it to a different press that had published Harry Potter in Canada. They did pretty well with it, but then they decided they were gonna be a distributor. Then I was all set to publish it myself as an eBook, and this other publishing company came along that did

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

eBooks and audiobooks, and also for books that had some readership, paperback copies. They published it. I still get royalties for it, but my partner was a lawyer and

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

she wrote a book on legal research, for which she got really tiny bit of royalties, 3% or something, for most of its run. She made more money on that book than I've made on all my other books combined. But anyway, wasn't for the money that I did it. I think Beyond the Pale is a really good book and I hope people will still read it and like it. Besides Riverfinger, I wrote

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

one other novel called Risk, which I think was very miscategorized and misunderstood. I meant it to be an anti-war book, not exactly like Mrs. Dalloway, but inspired by Mrs. Dalloway, and nobody really got that from it. They saw it as a lesbian romance and it just didn't do much,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

but that's what I meant it to be. I've published three or four books of poetry, one book of short stories and poetry, and one book of short stories. Of course, I liked them all. My first identification was as a poet. I'm in the process of writing a play

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

about my partner and her decision to exercise her right to die and her death from dementia and community and care taking which may have a public reading this year, we'll see, looks like it's possible. I've put a lot of energy

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

into that the last three or four years, but I've been writing poetry all along and I have at least two books of poetry on my hard drive, which I hope to organize if I can, we'll see. That's basically my publishing history. I've also written a lot of essays. I wrote essays for Sinister Wisdom that began

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

every issue, little short essays about whatever the topic was. Oh yeah, when I was editing Sinister Wisdom, I proposed that we do an issue on disability rights and mostly disabled women edited that. I tried to be clear about giving people for whom the issue

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

was relevant, editorial power, whatever the issue was about. I didn't always succeed at that, but I tried. So yeah, that's a lot of my publishing history.

BETSY KALIN:

Well, you actually touched on two more things that I wanted to talk about, and that was, can you tell me a little bit more about Sinister Wisdom and then

BETSY KALIN:

also some of the writers that you worked with and were inspired by?

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Sinister Wisdom has been a movable feast all of its life. I took it over from Melanie Kantrowitz, who unfortunately died of Parkinson's, I think maybe [inaudible]

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

couple years ago, maybe four or five years ago now, four years ago. I edited Sinister Wisdom for eight years. Some of those years Caryatis Cardia was my co-editor. We always had a collective of people who were doing the editorial decision making

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and Caryatis, and I would listen to all of their suggestions about a piece of writing then we would write to the writer about their process and if we wanted to accept their piece, what we would like to see changed, if we wanted something changed, and often we did. I would write rejection letters often, and I tried to write helpful rejection letters, not just

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

"Sorry, this doesn't meet our needs." People said, I gave really good rejection. It was good, but very difficult. At the end kind of trying, I mean

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

the biggest thing I learned editing Sinister Wisdom was how to apologize and how to apologize sincerely knowing whatever it was that I might have done and not being able to hear somebody. The other thing was learning to listen for what I did not naturally hear in people's work, because there were a lot of people who wrote cadences that were unfamiliar to me.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I had to really think in order to be open and clear in order to receive those different cadences. I worked really hard on that to appreciate all the people who wrote in -- I mean, sometimes people just wrote things

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

that I wouldn't publish or that other people didn't wanna publish. But for things that were like on the border that I didn't know how to listen to quiet, I would think about it. I would ask Gloria Anzaldúa was on the board then I think, and she was my good friend.

BETSY KALIN:

Well, can you just say that one more time, because it bumped again.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Sorry. Gloria Anzaldúa was on the board then, and she was also my good friend because we had lived in the same apartment building for a year or two. We used to have weekly writing sessions together, where we read each other's work and said what we wanted to accomplish in the next week and stuff. She was very helpful to me. Later,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Jewelle Gomez was really helpful, and all of the different editorial deciders and staff were also very helpful. Mostly, it was a good experience. It didn't end well, which sometimes happens when you've been

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

in the same positions too long, but It's okay now the ending is okay now.

BETSY KALIN:

You talked in your pre-interview about the greatest gift of your life being participation with other lesbian writers. And I just wondered if you could say that and if you could talk to that a little more.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Well, the greatest gift in my life has been lesbian writers

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and it's made my life feel large in a certain kind of way and also secure in a certain kind of way, like at different difficult points in my life.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Other lesbian writers have made my life feel large and secure, both of those things at once. Like sometimes I felt in difficult times, like I was lying in a hammock of their words. Back in the day, in the 70s. Many of the lesbian writers knew each other

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and we all knew of each other. It was a small enough community of people that we could all know each other. We could all read each other's work, and we could argue about it or we could find commonality in it, whatever. Gloria Anzaldúa was one of my best friends as a lesbian writer,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

as is Irena Klepfisz, who I've known for a long time. Actually, I met her first at lesbian gardens, which is a whole other story. I think she recounts in the Sinister Wisdom issue about conditions. But we gradually got to be friends and we got to be better friends. We keep being really good friends over time and distance and illness and everything.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Judith Katz was one of my roommates back in Northampton And we have stayed friends all this time and became good friends again, when we co-edited good Jewish lesbian issue of Sinister Wisdom. Adrian was really important to me, and for a while,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

she lived down here in Santa Cruz and we had a kind of a complicated relationship. But we were friends of the third circle, I would say. One time I talked to Audre Lorde a couple for readings, and one time I got to talk to her on the phone when we were doing a Sinister Wisdom anthology.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I was so excited, but I wasn't friends with her. Jewelle introduced me to Lucy Jane Bledsoe, who's become a really good friend. I've become, kind of by happenstance, friends with Carolina de Robertis, that's much more recent,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

but I love her and her partner, Pam quite a bit. Carolina de Robertis is a fantastic writer, everybody should read her books. They're all as good as Beyond the Pale . Those are the people off the top of my head. But of course, there were more, there were so many people who contributed to Sinister Wisdom

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

whose writing was important to me in the moment or for several years or whose friendship mattered to me for a long time. Then as things happen, you lose contact or you forget about them in a certain way. You don't forget about them, but they're not who comes instantly to mind. So those are my

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

main influences. Audre Lorde was one of my main influences in writing Beyond the Pale, actually, as a writer, her book Zomi really made me know I could take the time to tell a story that I needed, but not everything needed to be written in postmodern haste, quickly or in a blur of short sentences

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

or in one page. That you could take 400 pages to tell a story, and that was totally a good thing to do. That was great. She was really important to me in that way. I mean, I was always looking for the other voices, the voices I didn't grow up hearing. I grew up hearing Spanish, so I had some familiarity with Spanish literature,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

but not of course with of Latina dykes till I was much older. Yeah.

BETSY KALIN:

Great. Thank you. I wanted to check with you about time again and to see how much time we might have.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Not much. I can go for another 10 minutes, but usually I'm supposed to be fed right now.

BETSY KALIN:

10 minutes is okay.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Yeah.

BETSY KALIN:

Okay. All right. I wanted to ask about your relationship with Susan. If you could talk about that.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Susan was the lesbian lawyer of Northampton and she decided she was gonna move out to California. She was in a bad relationship with somebody

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and she came here at Hanukkah time and we went to a party together and the party was at my house. It was a Hanukkah party and we made a date to go out to breakfast together. I was like, this is a mistake. I don't know what I'll talk to her about. Then breakfast lasted for three hours, and then I had to do errands for Sinister Wisdom

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and we went to the bank and she touched my cheek just like this in the bank. I knew at that moment that we were gonna be lovers for the rest of our lives. I just knew. She went back to Northampton and she knew too. I mean, we both knew. There were, of course, hard things. At the time, I had another lover or two,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

but I had a couple of exes who were like, "It's very nice that Susan came to visit you, but could she go home now?" They got over it eventually. Susan and I were well suited to each other. We were both, I think I said earlier, firstborn children and type A's and she had her own work to do.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

When she moved out here, she became a legal librarian and then she became a tax preparer. She was very smart. She worked for the San Jose courts for many years and we had a great time together. We traveled together, we did political work together until she got dementia,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and then that was very hard. It was hard to realize that that was what was happening. It was hard to go through. Everybody said I did a good job and I don't have regrets about it, but it's just sad when your lover leaves

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

while she's still alive, that's a difficult thing. I hope nobody has to face that anymore going forward. But I also wanna say that I've had tremendous friendships, both with writers and not writers with my ex-lovers and with other people. I would say the network of lesbian friendship

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

has made my life possible. I remember the first time I had any serious hospitalization, I had pancreatitis and Beyond the Pale had been published recently before that, a couple years before, and Susan kept talking about moving to Vancouver. Then when I was in the hospital, all these people showed up and Susan said after,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

"We can't move, you have all these people who show up here." I said, "That's right. We were never gonna move." But yeah. I mean, we went to a therapist at some point after her mother died. The therapist said, you don't really have any need of me,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

you just need to talk to each other. You're doing better than 90% of the 95% of the couples I see. That was encouraging. I think that was true. We were just having trouble in one little area and dealt with it until she started losing her memory. Then we went back to the therapist to try to talk about it, but it was difficult. She never admitted

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

that she had dementia. She had Lewy body dementia, which has links to Parkinson's and she heard in Parkinson's and she decided she wanted to exercise her right to die, which she had always wanted. I mean, she'd wanted 10 years before she'd been in the group all those years of women who wanted to exercise their right to die

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and she didn't get that chance because she had a seizure disorder with the dementia that nobody understood and the seizure disorder killed her. It broke her heart basically. I mean, it weakened her heart so much that at the end, she died in her sleep having a seizure. That was very hard. But again, I had tremendous support

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and I grieved for two, three years pretty deeply. But now I mostly remember the good times, all the rides we had and the trips we took and the beautiful places we saw together and how important that was for both of us, how nurturing. That was my relationship with her and my friends continue having relationships

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

like that with me, and I'm very grateful for it.

BETSY KALIN:

Thank you. That's beautiful. I love it. The last thing, our very short, pithy answers to questions. This will last like a minute.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Okay

BETSY KALIN:

If you could tell your 15 year old self anything, what would it be?

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I would tell her that as soon as she learned to drive, she would have a great ride in the world and be very lucky to have it.

BETSY KALIN:

Great. Thank you. Why is it important to you to tell your story?

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Well, lesbian stories don't get told all that often,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

and It's not exactly that I fear for my legacy, but I hope that people will read my books when I'm gone for a while. I mean, we may be coming not just to the end of my life, but to the end of the planet's life, the end of human life on the planet. That's a possibility, but as long as there are humans on the planet,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I want them to know that lives can be transformed by love and can be made possible by connection and to become productive with encouragement. and that if we share our idea is with each other, we become part of the DNA

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

of human kind, of all humankind going forward, as part of the Intellectual and creative DNA of our species and that the more positive we can make those to the future of the DNA of our species, the better it is for us all. That's what I would say.

BETSY KALIN:

Thank you. OUTWORDS is

BETSY KALIN:

the first national project to capture and share our history through in-depth interviews. What is the importance of a project like OUTWORDS? If you could please mention OUTWORDS in your answer

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

OUTWORDS is important because It shares these histories of writers. I'm assuming because it's called OUTWORDS, you're interviewing mostly writers. Is that correct?

BETSY KALIN:

No, it's all LGBTQIA elders.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Okay. LBGTQIA elders. It's important that our stories be collected, have a central place where people can find them and share them with each other. When I was doing research for Beyond the Pale, I went to the NYU labor library and they had everything there

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

about labor, I mean, maybe not everything, but they had buttons and they had interviews with survivors of the triangle fire, and they had photographs and they had files and all this stuff that related to the labor movements in the United States. I think that's really important for LBGTQIA elders to have all our stuff in one place. Also,

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

I hope embedded in a microfiche somewhere where it could be dug up in 2000 years and found, that would be good.

BETSY KALIN:

Great. Thank you, Elana.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

You're welcome.

BETSY KALIN:

I really appreciate you going over a bit with us.

ELANA DYKEWOMON:

Thank you.