Tag: LGBTQ

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Growing Up Golem Is Being Republished!

Hi everyone.

Apologies for crossposting, if you’ve seen this already!

I’m very excited that my memoir GROWING UP GOLEM is going to be republished by Indolent Books in an all-new edition, after 13 years. And preorders are available NOW!

The estimable lesbian critic and poet Julie Enszer said of the book, “Minkowitz presents herself as a golem, created and controlled by her wacky, needy, and sexually abusive mother.… The quest of the book is Minkowitz’s transformation from golem to human; she desires, secretly to be a servant no longer for her mother, her sister, or the women she dates. Through their quest, Minkowitz explores her early life with the requisite wry humor that makes the book highly, even compulsively readable.… Emotional complexity, fierce imagination and compelling prose.”

The Hugo and Nebula Award-winning science-fiction author Terry Bisson said of GUG, “Rich and wild, dark and funny, as fearless as her legendary journalism and as scary as a fairy tale. A serious writer at the top of her game. I love this book!”

“In Growing Up Golem,” the late novelist Ellis Avery said, “Donna Minkowitz comes to the unlikely, brilliant conclusion that she must have been her mother’s golem, a manikin formed from clay and garbage and sacred letters… Exciting, startlingly fresh. Donna Minkowitz takes a dazzling leap of fancy and then writes a new bridge into being behind her for the rest of us to follow.”

 

The book was shortlisted for both a Lambda Literary Award for memoir, and the Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Nonfiction Prize.

But I always felt this memoir didn’t get quite enough attention when it came out, so I’m over the moon that Indolent Books is bringing it out again!

If you do me a favor and preorder now, it will help my small-press publisher with publication costs

You can order right now by clicking on this secure link (just $16):

https://buy.stripe.com/4gMbJ22qdcrV65GgvK6kg18

And save the date for my New York City launch event — Thursday, April 9 at the Bureau of General Services — Queer Division at 7 PM, 208 W. 13th St. I’ll be speaking with the great Griffin Hansbury! Or for my Beacon launch event, Thursday, May 21 at 7 PM at the Howland Cultural Center with Ruth Danon, 477 Main Street in Beacon, NY! Or my event in High Falls, NY at Blue Heron Books with Kristen Holt-Browning, 4 PM on Sunday, April 12.

Thank you so much —

Donna

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Made/Up at the Newburgh Fringe Festival!


Hey, I’m thrilled to let you know that I’ll be performing a hyper-interactive show, Made/Up, in the very first Newburgh Fringe Festival, Saturday, October 24 at 1 PM! Tickets are $10 (plus $2 facilities fee). Location: The Ritz Theater, 107 Broadway in Newburgh, N.Y.

Made/Up combines writing by me about my life with writing by YOU, the audience. Those of you interested in memoir writing might especially want to come to this!

What stories do we tell about ourselves, and what happens when we want to change those stories? In this highly interactive performance, memoirist-turned-fiction-writer Donna Minkowitz reads selections from all three of her “defiant, playful, dark and funny” books (Kirkus), and invites the audience to come up with on-the-spot micro-memoirs and micro-fiction stories about themselves.

My students (or people who have been my students) are especially invited to come.

This is the show for you if you’ve ever wanted to write about your life and wondered how to go about it. It’s ABSOLUTELY for you if you’ve ever thought about writing a fairy tale about yourself, or imagining yourself as an inanimate object. (The Port Authority Bus Terminal? A poisoned peach? A subway train? The Vietnam War? A vibrator?)

For tickets, click here:

https://secure.qgiv.com/for/newburghfringefestival/event/madeup/

(You can also get tix with $12 cash at the door.) Would love to see you there!
Donna

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Rainbow Book Fair!

Hey, I’m thrilled that I will be one of only two featured readers at the Rainbow Book Fair, the largest LGBTQ literary event in the country!

Come see me read from DONNAVILLE at length and answer your questions on Saturday, May 10 at 3 PM at the LGBTQ Center, 208 W. 13th Street in New York City! The Chills at Will podcast recently called DONNAVILLE “a master class in worldbuilding… deft, with vivid imagination.”

Looking forward to seeing you there.<3

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Queerness as Holiness


This is a brief talk I gave at the First Presbyterian Church of Beacon as part of their first Pride Service, June 26, 2022.

By Donna Minkowitz

Since I first felt the power of queerness in my life when I was 14, it has seemed to me like a kind of fierceness, a kind of fire, the sensation that radical joy is worth fighting for, that sex is worth fighting for, that the funky beautiful intoxicating overflowing life force inside yourself is a thing to defend, a thing to show, a thing to love, a thing to refuse to squash or strangle or imprison within gates of adamantine iron.

I’m here to speak on behalf of of that life force.

As a young adult in the 80s, I was part of the first generation of activists to reclaim the word QUEER for ourselves. Some of the stronghearted holy power of queerness comes across in these lines that the gay singing group The Flirtations used to sing, which were written by a black gay British man named Labi Siffre:

the higher you build your barriers
the taller I become
the more you refuse to hear my voice
the louder I will sing

“When they insist we’re just not good enough,” the song says, “just look em in the eye and say/We’re gonna do it anyway! We’re gonna do it anyway!
Anyway!

And that my friends, is the buoyant, ever-defiant power of queerness.

This fiery joy is also what our queer brother the Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins had in mind when he spoke of Jesus metaphorically as a falcon:

“I caught this morning morning’s minion,
kingdom of daylight’s dauphin,
dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding of the rolling level underneath him steady air
, and striding high there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing in his ecstasy!
Then off, off forth on swing, as a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding/ Rebuffed the big wind…
Brute beauty and valor and act, oh air, pride, plume here/ Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion times told lovelier, more dangerous. Oh my chevalier!”

For that is queerness too, the wild life force that refuses to give in to narrow demands of propriety. Queerness is also the ecstasy Hopkins is invoking in this poem, and the willingness to embrace wild, unchained beauty even when it might be socially or politically dangerous, because all beauty and pleasure comes from God, in fact, as Hopkins is suggesting in this poem, it IS God.

Beyond this, queerness is the radical belief in the goodness and innocence of pleasure, and I am thinking of myself at 14, discovering kisses and affectionate touch, discovering hands shoulders long hair and bellybuttons in all their sweetness and goofiness.

The queer life force within me has saved me so many times, it saved me as a teenager when the enlivening, flowering beauty of puberty gave me a power to stand fast against the violence I was experiencing at home, as a young and as an older adult when the sunny queer force in my blood gave me hope and creative power that always let me sail past depression and obstacles.

Thank you very much for inviting me here today to your beautiful congregation to speak about the connection between queerness and holiness.
And thanks to the supremely alive, defiant queer life force inside me that keeps my blood flowing. Thank you.