Prize-winning Northampton novelist believes success must take its own shape
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NORTHAMPTON - Susan Stinson came out to her parents when she was 34, upon publication of her first novel, 1994's "Fat Girl Dances With Rocks," its cover featuring the author's 17-year-old heroine Char, who resembles the author, cavorting in all her fleshed-out glory - with rocks in her fists and bliss on her face.
"OK this is gonna be public," Stinson, who is now 50, says she thought at the time. She wrote a letter home, spilling all.
Her parents back in Texas, Bill and Mollie Stinson of the World War II generation, did not exactly drop dead clutching their hearts. "They were lovely," the author said, while parking her iconic red trike this week by a stone bench on the Northampton bike path. "I thought they knew (I was gay) but they didn't. I had always left subtle hints."
A few weeks ago, she had news that couldn't wait for the U.S. mail.
Later this month, Stinson, the writer-in-residence at Forbes Library and author of three novels and a book of poetry, will travel to Manhattan to accept the Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists' Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation, a champion of LGBT literature. The prize comes with $5,000. She got a phone call in March from Lambda's Executive Director Tony Valenzuela, who said of Stinson, "Her work is so valuable. We think it will last."
"It goes right to the heart of my dreams and fears," said Stinson. "The name of the prize is so fabulous. Mid-career implies so much - there's a second half."
The event is the 23rd Annual Lammy Awards, which will honor several writers May 26, including playwright Edward Albee.
"Albee!" said Stinson. "I read him in high school."
She immediately called her parents, who were attending a reunion for Bill's Korean War Air Force squadron, of which only 14 members are left. "They were so excited, handing the phone back and forth," said Stinson. "My mom started to cry, then handed the phone to my dad and they both started to cry. 'Can we tell?' asked my mother. 'Yes we can,' I said, and they went and told all their friends at the reunion about their fat lesbian daughter."
'Always a fat kid'
Stinson has no problem being identified as fat, she says, because that's what she is. Euphemisms like "overweight" imply that one inhabits a temporary shape waiting to be corrected.
"Bodies change," she says. "The perfect body is so unattainable. I was always a fat kid. The central theme to my writing is to try to create fat characters we can relate to and not be reduced to those characteristics."
The monetary award from Lambda is significant to Stinson, who has long pieced together a living as novelist, freelance editor and writing coach. "It's livelihood," she said. "It gives me more time to do what I do without worrying."
Stinson will deliver a poem at the gathering following today's Pride March, an exhortation that begins: "Fat girls let your shirts ride up. Lie down on the cold spring dirt and get mud on your fat back."
She has been participating in marches off and on since her youth in Colorado. By high school she knew she was gay. "I was wildly in love with my best friend," she said, and started hanging with others coming to similar grips. "'OK, what do gay people do?' we said. We'd head into Denver at midnight for the 'Rocky Horror Picture Show' covered in makeup and Vaseline. Is this gay enough?"
And then Stinson laughs, a belly laugh, a long, infectious eruption that invites participation.
Stinson gets around solely by trike, even in winter, a three-speed red Torker with a rear-mounted basket for hauling her many essentials. Her girlfriend gave it to her after her first trike was hit by a snowplow a couple winters back.
"It's made for people my size," she said, "with an extra-wide seat." Her arthritic knees make climbing stairs difficult, but don't bother her so much while cycling. "I love going up and down the (bike path) ramps. I did a sideways wheelie at the Y the other day." She has pedaled the Torker as far as Belchertown and back. It is as much a part of her as a shoe. But it has its limits. It can't be carried upstairs like other bikes and it's too big to fit on PVTA bus-racks.
"But I'm happier without a car," she said. "Northampton was laid out before they had cars. It's perfect."
Being a target
Stinson's most recent novel, "Venus of Chalk," which was named one of the top 10 lesbian books of the year by The Publishing Triangle, has an early scene where main character Carline is serenaded on the street with calls of "Sooooo-eeeee!" by teenage punks, who toss lit cigarettes at her and call her a pig.
Though the butts don't burn her, Carline goes home and deliberately burns herself on the wrist in a moment of self-loathing before leaving her lover and embarking on a life-affirming bus trip to Texas.
The cigarette scene hits home for Stinson. At the tail end of a daunting trike ride home from UMass in the rain a few years back, which also saw her having to re-attach the trike's popped chain, Stinson was accosted by adult men, not teenage punks, in a pickup truck.
"They threw cigarette butts at me," said Stinson. "Fat women are often harassed in the street. Being fat makes you an easy target. It's kind of 'othering.' It can be really unpleasant."
Her 1999 essay in the Springfield Republican on attitudes toward body size, in which Stinson compared her body to those depicted in Rubens paintings, led to hate mail sent to her house. "'You're not like a Rubens painting,' it said. 'You're morbidly obese. And we, the taxpayers, have to take care of you.' It hit some vulnerable places in me. It really set me back. I didn't want to go out, be visible. This was not engaging in intellectual argument - it was personal."
But she thinks she understands the hangups over people of size. "It truly has to do with a fear of death," she said. "You're carrying peoples' fear of mortality. A lot of people look at a fat body and think we're choosing our death."
But if anybody's comfortable in her own skin, it's Stinson. "I have a lot of respect and affection for my corporal self," she said.
Controversial subject
Stinson's new work, "Spider in a Tree," a novel about the fiery Calvinist preacher Jonathan Edwards, still a darling of the religious right and has no LGBT content. Stinson has been criticized for taking on Edwards, whom she calls "an unbelievably powerful poetic writer."
"I understand the raised eyebrows, but it breaks my heart that women's writing vanishes even from queer and feminist media when it strays from narrowly proscribed topics," she said. "It was lesbians who taught me how to tell the stories that arise from venturing into what feels like forbidden territory."
She became interested in Edwards, who preached in Northampton, during her many excursions into the Bridge Street Cemetery near her home, where Edwards' daughter is buried. Curiosity did the rest.
"I heard that he wrote sermons in an elm tree," said Stinson, who writes: "He would climb the big elm in front of his house by boards nailed to the trunk and dangle his long, skinny legs off a limb .... most people who passed by the house on King Street had felt the slam of his sermons truing their souls."
"He would say I'm going to hell," said Stinson. "But no matter what he would think of me, he's part of what made me, so he'll have to live with that." Cue belly laugh.
In Edwards' sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," the condemned are first dangled over flame by God and then tossed in. Stinson, giving voice to a spider Edwards brushes off his shirt, has the arachnid shoot a web and climb right back up that tree.
"Whatever your God would say of me, I am not damned," says the spider. "I did not turn to salt."
Stinson wrote a lot of "Spider in a Tree" in longhand, a way of getting closer to the 18th century firebrand she was getting to know. "He made his own ink and quills," said Stinson. "There was a paper shortage. He wrote sermons on the backs of shopping lists, fans his daughters had made and on the back of a bill of sale for one of his slave girls."
"I think about power and who gets a voice," said Stinson.
Bob Flaherty can be reached at bflaherty@gazettenet.com
This story has been corrected.
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