Theresa Crater

 God in a Box is now $2.99 on Amazon.

It’s the early 1970s. The time of feminism, psychotherapy and eastern philosophy. On a lark, Stacey     Carmichael attends a lecture about meditation from one of those new Indian gurus who have suddenly appeared everywhere. Intrigued in spite of her skepticism, she learns to meditate— and has the experience of a lifetime. Stacey decides to become a teacher of meditation herself—and then the human side of this organization rears its ugly head. Lesbians need not apply. Leave your partner, become a celibate, and then we’ll see. How can she give up this meditation that has given her so much? But how can she give up who she really is?

I’ll be at COSine on Saturday, January 28, 2012, doing a panel on NaNoWriMo at 3:00 p.m., the group signing at 7:00, a reading at 6:00 and a panel on eBooks at 7:00. Check out this sf/f/h con in Colorado Springs by clicking here.

Happy New Year everyone.

Winter Solstice was celebrated in the British Isles in a very special way. Many of the great monuments were built to track the sun. Many of the mounds are oriented so that the sun enters their long entrance ways and illuminates their inner chamber on the solstice. The Winter Solstice represents the rebirth or rekindling of the light, the sun. This process reminds me of the conception of the Solar Hero, the Christ.

Here’s a site that shows the beginning of this process at Newgrange on December 18th.

I had the privilege and honor of taking an advanced writing class with Joanna Russ at the University of Washington in Seattle. I was studying literature mostly, but took a few writing classes. Russ stood out as brave in that time of worship of “high literature” over popular or (God forbid) genre fiction. In addition to her excellent critiques, she gave sound advice about how to keep writing in a world in which we’d have to work full time for a while, if not for our adult lives. I remember her suggesting that we might want to take a job that didn’t consume our writing energy so we’d have that left to write during off hours. She suggested not writing junk fiction to make a living, as our “real” work would start to resemble it.

 My two favorites of hers are in fiction, The Female Man, with four women who come from the worlds that embody the variety of gender roles often discussed in the 1970’s. Meet especially Jael, warrior with steel teeth and catlike retractable claws, from an earth with separate-and warring-female and male societies. But then there’s the librarian waiting to get married.

 Her nonfiction is equally revolutionary. I loved How to Suppress Women’s Writing, published at a time when a male student said to me in all seriousness after class once that no woman had ever written a classic nor ever would. Yes, this was in the 20^th century. I told him he was a moron and not to talk to me anymore.

Thank you Joanna Russ for all you have done for us—entertaining, teaching and clearing the way!