On feminist aesthetics: Gina Abelkop and Birds of Lace Press

February 26, 2007 at 9:34 am | Posted in poetry, the forg | 4 Comments

[Untitled, by Alexis Dei Santi, part of the collaborative project Intentions Still Artifact/Watching You, Watching Us forthcoming from Birds of Lace Press]

A couple of months ago I came across the website for Birds of Lace, a small cooperative feminist press founded in 2005 which produces, among other things, Finery, a quarterly feminist literary and arts journal that publishes ‘the experimental, devastating and grotesquely gorgeous’ by women and genderqueers. Gina Abelkop, the poet working towards her MFA at Sarah Lawrence who founded Birds of Lace, agreed to talk with me over email about the press and the possibilities of a feminist focus for publishing. Read the interview behind the cut.

[Note: This is is the first in a periodic series of features and interviews promoting the work of feminist writers and artists. If you are or know women whose work should be featured here, please email your suggestions to ppoussin AT gmail DOT com.]

What was your impetus for starting this project? Did you have a particular inspiration or idea in mind?

My impetus for starting Birds of Lace was seeing and reading so much incredible art made by my friends; I really wanted some kind of forum where feminist artists could share with each other, collaborate, and have a chance to take in new, smart, interesting, complex work that challenges fixed notions of identity and form. I was taking a feminist poetry class at Antioch College with Ami Mattison at the time and was really inspired by the writing of my peers. The first issue of Finery really stemmed from wanting to collect some of the poems and stories I was reading & make them available to more people. I also really liked the idea of handmade objects, pages literally sewn together and imbued with all the love of a hand-crafted keepsakes, a sort of grassroots, affection-laden approach to distributing something really dear to you.

What are some upcoming projects for Birds of Lace, and what’s your vision for the future of the press?

For right now Birds of Lace hopes to continue releasing Finery while also making the slow move towards publishing full-length books. We’d like to do more collaborative texts, such as the upcoming Intentions Still Artifact/Watching You, Watching Us project. We’re also officially becoming a collective, with several feminist artists working in different mediums will taking on editing duties as well as organizing events and projects in various parts of the United States; look for an announcement about this on the website in the next few weeks. Ultimately, my dream vision for Birds of Lace has always been to have it function as a connecting point for women and queers to work together creatively, to produce art whose intention, cheesy as it may sound, is love and movement towards equity.

Can you talk more about the collaborative project Intentions Still Artifact/Watching You, Watching Us? What appeals to you about collaborative art?

Originally, Intentions Still Artifact/Watching You, Watching Us really sprung from pretty selfish reasons: I loved Katherine LaPlant’s poetry and wanted to read more of it as soon as possible, and thought why not? I think Katherine was the one who actually suggested that we write a book together; at this point we’d only met once but by the time we were fully immersed in the project our friendship had grown in really strange, fun ways, since everything we were learning about each other was through the open-for-interpretation arena of poetry. Around this time I was becoming really interested in photography as well, and my friends Alexis Dei Santi and Carrie Gabella were producing really interesting, vivid work that held many of the same themes, but were approached quite differently.

I’ve always loved the experience of collaborating, and the spirit behind it: nothing we do, as artists, is really singular or stands alone, we’re always being inspired by something, by each other. In queer and feminist communities this is particularly important, because often our work is so often ghettoized, ignored, or critiqued for not having broad enough appeal. In the case of ISA/WYWU, we were all being inspired by each other’s work, which I consider to all have a really strong, although diverse, feminist perspective. Carrie and I did a collaboration for Hothouse (a zine made by writer/photographer Roxanne Carter, who runs Persephassa, a fantastic small press) and ever since then collaborations are all I’ve wanted to do. It’s also so important to be in contact with other feminist artists, I think, to not only be sharing concepts and inspirations but also truly pushing each other, keeping each other productive. When Katherine and I were working on ISA I was writing a poem a week during a time when I was not in school for the first time in my life, really, so it was a great way to keep each other writing as well.

Birds of Lace recently became a collective-run press. Did your interest in collaboration inform this move?

I’ve always envisioned Birds of Lace as a collective, for reasons mostly having to do with a desire to locate ourselves, as feminist writers and artists, within a community, a movement. Having more editors will allow for a greater range of work to be published by Birds of Lace while also putting into practice positive models of support and shared energy in the arts, rather than competition. I really love what the LTTR collective is doing and hope to one day be able to print Finery in a similar manner.

Your press explicitly promotes the work of feminist writers. Is there a kind of writing that, for you, is ‘feminist writing’? What are your criteria, if any?

To publish feminist writing means offering up that many more starting points for dialogue, even if it’s on a small scale like Birds of Lace. Reading/viewing feminist art, I hope, sometimes lessens loneliness, invokes empathy and inspires productivity in myriad forms. Starting conversations with feminist art is always exciting– to respond to something that truly engages you, to examine, to re-model and explore. Birds of Lace hopes to engage the reader/viewer in these palimpsest histories, really get the brain whirring and working in surprising ways. As far as what qualifies as feminist writing, I’d like to say that it’s just a matter of self-definition for the artists, but I don’t think it’s that easy. There’s some literature or music I would definitely identify as feminist, but the artist may not feel that at all. Definitions are tricky because they want to present a final word on any given subject when that’s almost always nearly impossible.

That’s a great point. Without attempting the certainty of a definition, is there a less restrictive way to talk about the dynamics of feminist art and literature?

I asked Alexis Dei Santi what her definition of feminist literature is, because I am having so much trouble articulating it! Here is her response, which I think is pretty clear and also malleable:

“Well, off the top of my head I’d say that feminist literature is written from a feminist standpoint with a message and a discrete goal related to that standpoint and maybe a more clearly articulated target audience, where literature that’s feminist comes from a feminist perspective, perhaps even the same one as feminist literature, but might not carry the same clarity of message or have the same directness of purpose. I by no means think that makes it less valuable, just different. On one hand it might help the author and the reader to have ambiguous goals, which allows for a freer range of interpretation, while having a more definitive structure to the message often lends the work a greater level of boldness and structure which can be valuable when you’re dealing with an experimental or otherwise esoteric piece of writing…”

I recently did a paper on the feminist lesbian literature of the 1970s and trying to come up with a definition for lesbian literature was also really difficult. What if other people define your work as feminist but you don’t? Is it about audience or the author or some combination of both? For myself, I’ve always identified any writing that really worked on me intellectually or emotionally as feminist, something I feel in my gut, but I don’t suppose that helps much. Birds of Lace really strives to publish a variety of feminist and queer voices, and I think that the feminist “agenda” in the various work we put out there have varying degrees of tangibility.

You can learn more about Birds of Lace at its website, birdsoflace.com. Find excerpts from the forthcoming Intentions Still Artifact/Watching You, Watching Us here.