Merry Gangemi is a writer, activist, poet, editor, and all around dilettante.

Her short fiction and poetry can be found in Paterson Literary Review, Journal of New Jersey Poets, Sinister Wisdom, and Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly.

She was awarded the Audre Lorde creative writing award for poetry in 1999 and currently resides in Woodbury, Vermont via San Francisco.

July 23, 2008

Nona Caspers visits Woman-Stirred Radio

Nona Caspers : author of Heavier Than Air, @ 4:30 pm. Nona Casper's short story, "Country Girls," the first in her marvelous collection, Heavier than Air, is ravishing, heart-rending, and dense with images of aching space and visceral moments of awe, the physical bearing of racing, drumbeating rock, something for me like Black Rebel Motorcycle Gang, or Erasure at its most mesmerizing, threatening, and transformative. But it is also both subtle and straightforward, with an intensity that forces you to read on, to pause and remember, to breathe!! Here is an excerpt:

"'I love this,'" I shouted into Cynthia's ear and she laughed….I remember bumping into people. I remember bumping into Auntie Katie dancing with Alquin Schultz, and my mother and father. I remember whirling off, whirling and whirling with the pressure of Cynthia's hand in the middle of my back and Cynthia's breath against my temple. I could feel the squirrel-bone ring against my thigh in my pocket—I had my plans…. I slipped my hand up Cynthia's back between her shoulder blades and she looked into my eyes and I saw our future; Cynthia and I living together like man and wife. I didn’t know what that meant exactly, but I married Cynthia with every feeling in me, with every sound I heard in my fourteen years, with every breath and eyelash, with everything I knew. I married Cynthia Hinnencamp under that darkening sky, with the Melrose band thumping, the smell of sweat and corncobs and mowed church grass in the air. I married her I married her I married her. I must have dropped to my knees, I must have dropped and folded my hands, like a declaration. I got the ring out of my pocket and took Cynthia's hand. And at first, they must have thought something was wrong, that I was ill or had hurt my ankle. The people around us stopped dancing, and then people around them stopped and on and on until a hush formed and the band stopped playing and I was on my knees looking up at Cynthia and I couldn’t get up. Someone shifted on the wood. Someone coughed. A crow cawed."

So. tune in to Woman-Stirred Radio, tomorrow, Thursday, July 24th, for an conversation with Nona Caspers, at 4:30 (eastern). Woman-Stirred Radio on WGDR 91.1 fm or streamed live online at wgdr.org. Queer culture at its best!

Nona Caspers moved to San Francisco from rural Minnesota. She is an Associate Professor at San Francisco State University. Her recent book of stories, HEAVIER THAN AIR (University of Massachusetts Press) won the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction and was an Editor’s Choice in the New York Times Book Review. Nona’s stories have been widely published in literary journals and anthologies; she has received an Iowa Fiction Award from the Iowa Review, a Cooper Prize from the Ontario Review, a Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award, and a Barbara Demming Memorial Award. http://online.sfsu.edu/~ncaspers/Welcome.htm